


Another Shot at Life

by starlady



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Multi, weird force shit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 85,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23888890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlady/pseuds/starlady
Summary: War! As the ruthless Sith Lord Count Dooku steps up his attacks on the crumbling Republic, the Jedi Order has repeatedly compromised itself at the Supreme Chancellor’s behest. Evil is everywhere.Principled Senators are powerless to halt the slide into tyranny. Even as the unseen Darth Sidious directs Dooku and the fiendish droid leader General Grievous, the dwindling number of Jedi Knights are increasingly viewed with suspicion by a war-weary public.A desperate battle at Mon Cala has forced Jedi Generals Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to repair and resupply at the LOTHAL system in the Outer Rim. While there, a disturbance in the Force brings them to an ancient Jedi Temple…
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala & Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 71
Kudos: 153





	1. Opening Crawl/Visions and Voices

**Author's Note:**

> Set approximately six weeks before ROTS. Incorporates the first six seasons of The Clone Wars and most, but not all, material from season seven.

War! As the ruthless Sith Lord Count Dooku steps up his attacks on the crumbling Republic, the Jedi Order has repeatedly compromised itself at the Supreme Chancellor’s behest. Evil is everywhere.

Principled Senators are powerless to halt the slide into tyranny. Even as the unseen Darth Sidious directs Dooku and the fiendish droid leader General Grievous, the dwindling number of Jedi Knights are increasingly viewed with suspicion by a war-weary public.

A desperate battle at Mon Cala has forced Jedi Generals Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to repair and resupply at the LOTHAL system in the Outer Rim. While there, a disturbance in the Force brings them to an ancient Jedi Temple…

* * *

“Are you sure this is the right place?”

Obi-Wan Kenobi couldn’t help the note of skepticism in his voice, and he didn’t bother to try. As Anakin Skywalker set the flyer down in the grass a few hundred meters away from the unadorned, unworked stone spire that he insisted held the source of the disturbance in the Force they’d both sensed, their banter was a necessary diversion from the tension that they both felt, singing in the bond between them.

“Obi-Wan, I’m sure of it,” Anakin said with more patience than was his normal wont. He reached across Obi-Wan’s seat and triggered the landing gear, then set the small ship down with his usual deft skill, and without his usual dramatics. Once he saw that all systems were nominal, Obi-Wan powered down the engines. “Can’t you feel the vergence for yourself?”

 _Oh, I can feel the vergence, all right_ , Obi-Wan thought, with a glance at Anakin. The most famous vergence in the Force of them all was looking unusually well-rested thanks to their enforced idleness in the Lothal system. Their battle against the Separatists at Mon Cala had left their combined fleet too badly damaged to make it all the way back to the Outer Rim garrison, but the Lothal system had enough in the way of repair facilities that they could return to Coruscant in another two days, with some judicious triaging.

At first, Obi-Wan hadn’t felt the disturbance in the Force that Anakin had, but his former apprentice had persuaded him that taking a shuttle downplanet would be a good way to get some exercise, if nothing else. But now, as they stepped down the gangway, Obi-Wan could feel the living Force all around them, stronger and clearer than it had been for a long time—since before the war, at least, except for Mortis.

It was like suddenly taking a hit of pure oxygen in a house on fire, and he felt Anakin’s surprise and delight echo in the Force around them as the effect worked on him too, even more powerfully. Obi-Wan suddenly felt as though he could run a marathon, or go ten rounds against Grievous and his droids without breaking a sweat. “This place is strong in the Force,” he said unnecessarily, looking around. The grassy plains stretched around them as far as the eye could see, broken at irregular intervals by stone outcroppings similar to the one before them. As they stepped out, he caught sight of a feline creature, its ears pointed and its striped head ludicrously round, regarding them curiously.

It chittered at him when Obi-Wan caught its eye, and for an instant he had a strange sense that the cat-creature knew who he was and why he was there. “What is that thing?” Anakin asked, stepping up beside him.

“A Loth-cat, I believe,” Obi-Wan said, dredging up the planetary précis from his memory. “The local subspecies of tooka. Mostly harmless, according to the reports.”

The Loth-cat was now padding toward Obi-Wan curiously. He crouched down, holding out his hand, and was rewarded when the cat bumped its grey head against his palm, then started purring.

“You and animals,” Anakin said, but he was smiling when Obi-Wan looked up at him. A light breeze ruffled his hair—they both needed a haircut, but hadn’t had time in the press of the war of late—and Obi-Wan was struck by a sudden thought: when was the last time he had seen Anakin look so uncomplicatedly happy? Before Barriss and Ahsoka, certainly, so…eight months, at least. More than a year, more likely.

The thought was disturbing, and Obi-Wan very carefully tucked it away where Anakin couldn’t sense it. He gave the Loth-cat one last scratch on its head and stood up. “Lead on,” he said, gesturing ironically, and Anakin rolled his eyes.

The grass gave out a few dozen meters ahead, and Obi-Wan was surprised to realize that they stood on a series of spiraling designs etched in the dirt that stretched out from the rock spire itself, the first sign that this place wasn’t merely a naturally occurring wellspring of Force energy. As he looked, mapping the terrain in his mind, he realized that the tiny spires which seemed irregular from this angle were in fact deliberately placed within the design.

“Obi-Wan, look,” Anakin said, his voice a little strained. At their feet, the ancient emblem of the Jedi Order was unmistakably carved into the ground, and Obi-Wan halted, superstitiously unwilling to walk over it. Instead, he stretched out with his senses. He could feel the Force around them, flowing through him and through Anakin, doing the same next to him.

“Do you feel it?” he asked, opening his eyes and looking at his partner.

Anakin looked a little spooked, which was honestly no less than what Obi-Wan felt. It was very hard not to think of Mortis, and everything that had gone wrong there. _We’ll be fine as long as we stick together_. “This is a Jedi Temple. And we’re meant to enter.”

“How?” Obi-Wan asked, keeping his tone light. He could feel Anakin’s awareness, diffuse and questing, spreading through the Force around him. Despite Anakin’s reputation for being terrible at “soft” Jedi skills, he was much better at some of the mystical aspects of Jedi life than Obi-Wan himself—as long as he didn’t think about it too much.

Anakin didn’t reply for a minute or two, his breathing settling into what was almost a meditation pattern. The breeze sang through the rocks, the daylight aurora danced overhead, and after another few moments Anakin’s eyes refocused. “Both of us, partners,” he said, his voice remote. “Two together, or none at all.”

Obi-Wan didn’t ask how Anakin knew, and he didn’t argue. Instead, he stepped up beside him, squaring his stance, and they stretched their hands out, the picture of the statues of the Jedi of old.

It was easy, after fourteen years, to reach out to each other through the Force, to turn their attention together to the spire of rock before them and the bright star of the vergence that hummed within it. _Beyond all things, at last, the Force_. Their master-padawan bond had never attenuated that much, and if they both had things they kept back from the bond, and each other, in moments like this it was still second nature.

The sound of rock scraping brought Obi-Wan’s awareness back to the world around them, and he opened his eyes to witness the incredible: the spire of rock before them rotated counterclockwise out of the ground, rising ponderously from where it had rested, hidden.

It wasn’t like lifting objects; there was no sense of weight, of exertion against the physical laws of the universe. The stone almost felt like it was encouraging them as it rose, a warm whisper at the base of his skull that Obi-Wan could only feel, not hear.

There was an unmistakable sense of something slotting into place, and a door revealed itself in the rock before them—but Anakin shook his head slightly. “Keep going,” he said, and Obi-Wan took another deep breath, reaching out to the Force once more. The stone kept rotating ever higher, revealing a second, grander entrance, with incised designs that tugged at Obi-Wan’s awareness like scraps of a remembered dream. But Anakin inhaled again. “There’s more,” he said, and now it did start to feel like effort, a sense of testing from the rock and the living Force that imbued it. Obi-Wan reached out to put his hand on Anakin’s shoulder, linking them more closely together with the contact, and slowly, the stone spun around until it revealed, not a door, but some kind of mural.

“A painting?” Obi-Wan asked, all his skepticism returning, but Anakin was already walking forward. The mural depicted three robed figures, limned in gold: a taller, bearded man in a headdress, flanked by a green-clad and green-haired woman with a green convor on her shoulder and, on his other side, a man clothed in black and red. A complex network of circles and lines radiated up from their heads, and their hands were haloed in gold as well. At their feet, a pack of massive brindled wolves took their ease, their lifelike eyes seeming almost like they were watching the two Jedi.

“The Mortis entities,” Anakin said quietly, staring up at the mural. From this angle, they seemed to be very tall indeed, much taller than they had been in life. “The Father, the Daughter, and the Son.”

“The bendu, the ashla, and the bogan,” Obi-Wan said, reciting the equivalences of the old archetypes that he’d been taught as a key to deciphering the myths that surrounded ancient Jedi history. “Anakin, if we want to enter the temple, we should return it to the position for one of the upper doors.”

Anakin turned to him, his eyes narrowing. “Obi-Wan. Do you really not remember what happened on Mortis?”

“Anakin, what happened on Mortis was undoubtably strange,” Obi-Wan said, uneasy. “But those Force-wielders we met weren’t deities, just—immensely powerful. It was strange, but it didn’t mean anything more than what it was.” He had wanted to believe that it really was Qui-Gon who had spoken to him in those visions; certainly the apparition’s focus on Anakin had been characteristic of his old master at his death. But he knew better than to think that Qui-Gon had somehow lingered on in the Force, no matter what Yoda said. He’d lit Qui-Gon’s funeral pyre himself, and all the old Force ghost stories started out with Jedi who didn’t leave behind a body when they died.

He could feel the weight of Anakin’s scrutiny, and he bore up under it as best he could. The secrets he was keeping were hidden far enough behind his shields that he had no qualms sharing his uppermost thoughts and feelings. “Master Yoda was right,” Anakin said at last, and he didn’t sound angry, just sad. “You really don’t believe.” Before Obi-Wan could formulate a response to that, he turned back to the mural. “I don’t remember all of what happened, but we met them, you know. They were— _are_ —real.”

“Anakin, they’re personifications of the ancient divisions of the Force, nothing more,” Obi-Wan said, as he might to a youngling, but his friend wasn’t listening. Instead, he was reaching out to the Force again, stretching out with his awareness.

At length, he opened his eyes again and looked down at his hands, laying out his fingers, then making a fist with his organic hand. “What is it?” Obi-Wan asked, despite himself, and Anakin glanced up at him.

“This is a gateway,” he said. “And I think I know how to get inside.”

“A gateway? To where?”

Anakin was looking up at the rock, reaching out with his left hand. “The future, by its nature, can be changed,” he said, in the tone of someone reciting a lesson. “Obi-Wan, help me.”

Obi-Wan came up and put his hand on his partner’s shoulder, ignoring his own doubts. He had faith in Anakin, if nothing else.

He did what he could to project his presence and strength as Anakin closed his eyes, breathing deeply. How long they stood there, with Anakin’s hand hovering over the hand of the figure he’d identified as the Daughter, Obi-Wan didn’t know. But he did realize, gradually, that a golden light was rising from the mural, sparks of light with no heat flaring up in front of them.

Anakin opened his eyes, that same light briefly shining from them. Obi-Wan just had time to register his beauty in that strange illumination, and then several things happened at once.

The Daughter’s hand moved, and the painting seemed to come alive as she turned to bow her head to the Father, who nodded back regally. Obi-Wan heard the howling of wolves, and then the ones painted on the rock stood up to move. There was a voice speaking just at the edge of his hearing, but he couldn’t track the words, all of his awareness focused on the pack of wolves which now trotted across the face of the rock to form a running circle. In the center of that circle, the face of the rock rippled as though it had turned to liquid, and then it faded to blackness.

“By the Force,” Obi-Wan breathed. Beside him, he felt Anakin’s awe, and a touch of fear. Unthinking, he squeezed his shoulder.

It was clearly a gateway, though to what, he had no idea. But he felt the compulsion, the sense that the Force was calling them to enter, and from the drift of Anakin’s thoughts, he felt it too.

Slowly, they walked over to the door and stood in front of it. Anakin stretched out his right hand experimentally, and Obi-Wan was somehow not surprised to see the tips of his fingers pass through the surface of the rock as if it were nothing but shadows. Somehow, now, it was. “Are you ready for this?” Obi-Wan asked.

Anakin swallowed. “Yes. Together.”

Obi-Wan took a deep breath and decided to dispense with pleasantries. “Give me your hand.” He reached out to grasp Anakin’s proffered hand, feeling the metal beneath the leather of his glove. Holding hands, they turned back to face the gateway.

“On three,” Anakin said, and then recited the count. Together, they jumped into the void.

Anakin Skywalker had learned long ago that having expectations about the Force was pointless. The gateway he and Obi-Wan jumped into was no different: it didn’t feel like being in hyperspace, and it didn’t feel like falling into a whirlpool. He didn’t know how long it was that he had the sensation of stepping out of his own head, the sense that everything was just at the edge of his grasp, and Anakin reached out with his mind and his free hand for it, not letting go of Obi-Wan—

And they fell in an unceremonious heap onto a surface that had no sensation besides solidity.

Beside him, Obi-Wan pushed himself to his hands and knees; Anakin did the same. When they were standing on their feet again, he looked around and couldn’t help but gasp.

They were standing in front of a gateway that was the twin, in black and white, of the Loth-wolves running around the door through the temple. But on this side the gateway was merely one in what seemed to be dozens if not hundreds, circles and triangles, in a world that lay amidst a field of stars, the portals connected to each other by a series of paths leading up, down, across and around.

“Where are we?” Obi-Wan breathed. He was open-mouthed and staring upwards at the stars surrounding them.

“You’re the Jedi Master,” Anakin said, trying and failing to make it sound like a joke. He was deeply unnerved in a way that he hadn’t felt since Mortis, and he didn’t like it. “Isn’t this part of your briefing when you become a Councilor?”

Obi-Wan shook his head, slowly, in wonderment. “Whatever this place is, it is far beyond the ken of the High Council.”

Anakin turned, looking at the stars above them. Distinct constellations were drawn in lines here and there, in no apparent pattern: he recognized a wolf and a convor among them. “Time has no meaning here, but it is ancient,” he said, struggling to put his feelings into words. “Like a world between worlds.”

Once he had voiced the words, he knew that he was right; the Force practically chimed with it. In that same medium, he felt Obi-Wan’s apprehension beside him, and his efforts to master it. “The Force led us here,” Obi-Wan said after a moment, turning to look at the gate behind them. “Let’s find out why.”

They walked down the path from their wolf-gate to where it joined the paths sprawling through the space. Anakin didn’t hesitate before turning to the right, and Obi-Wan followed.

As they walked, ripples spread out in white through the surface of the path beneath their feet, but they died quickly, as though the path were a dense medium. Gradually, Anakin became aware of voices, just at the edge of his perception. One of them, he realized with a start, was Obi-Wan’s.

_What is this place?_

He heard the reply too, and with a pang he realized that it sounded like Master Qui-Gon. _A conduit through which the entire Force of the universe flows._

 _Your past can ruin your future if you allow it_. That was himself nearly four years ago, talking to Ahsoka on Tatooine.

He almost expected the next voice: hers. _I have to sort this through on my own. Without the Council, and without you._

 _Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter._ That was unmistakably Yoda, but he sounded—different, somehow.

They walked for another minute or two before some instinct from the Force pulled at Anakin, hard. To his right, an unremarkable triangular gateway waited, quiescent, surrounded by angular decorative motifs he didn’t recognize. As they approached it seemed to flicker, and the space within its boundaries grew opaque.

As the mist roiled, Anakin heard Yoda’s voice again, still with that strange note to it. _Always in motion is the future_.

The gateway cleared, and they beheld what was clearly the holocomm chamber in the Temple, looking weirdly singed: blasterfire scoring streaked across the walls, and Obi-Wan and Yoda, who stood together at the center of the room, both looked terrible, shattered and defeated. Obi-Wan, Anakin saw, had several minor cuts and bruises on his face and hands and his robes were dirty and torn, as if he’d just come from a battlefield. His shoulders slumped and he looked utterly exhausted, but more than that, the light in his eyes was gone.

It was impossible not to feel the despair rolling off of him, and the sudden spike of worry and fear from Obi-Wan beside him mirrored his own. Anakin took an instinctive step backward, reaching out to him blindly. His fingers found Obi-Wan’s, and he felt his partner squeeze back, just as hard.

“If into the security recordings you go, only pain will you find,” Yoda was saying, disapproval clear in his voice. But the Obi-Wan on the other side of the gateway wasn’t swayed. Typical.

“I must know the truth, Master,” he said, adjusting the controls, and then a hologram rose, depicting the Room of the Thousand Fountains in the Temple. A Knight—Cyn Drallig—and two padawans Anakin vaguely recognized were backing into the pickup, deflecting a hail of blaster bolts. But then another lightsaber swung into the frame of the holo, the blade a bright blue, and Anakin cried out when he saw that fourth saber cut the other three Jedi down with ease.

Clone troopers entered the shot, laying down covering fire against a hostile still out of frame. The figure wielding the blue lightsaber was dressed as a Jedi too, in darker colors. When it turned,Anakin couldn’t even get the breath to scream.

His knees buckled so suddenly that it took Obi-Wan unawares, dragging them both down to a heap in front of the gateway.

“It can’t be…it can’t be…” the other Obi-Wan was saying inside the holocomm chamber, and Anakin did scream when he saw the dark Jedi—the _Sith_ —that he had become go to his knees in front of another robed figure.

 _“The traitors have been taken care of, Lord Sidious,”_ his counterpart said, and the Sith Lord passed a beneficent hand over his sweaty hair.

 _“Good . . . good . . . You have done well, my new apprentice,”_ he said. Through his drowning horror, Anakin realized that he recognized the voice.

Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. His friend and mentor for the past decade and more.

 _“Do you feel your power growing?”_ Sidious asked. In the holocomm chamber, Obi-Wan had gone ashen; beside him, Obi-Wan’s emotions were a roiling maelstrom that matched his own. Pain, shock, anger, fear. Despair.

 _“Yes, my Master,”_ the new Sith lord said, eyes humbly downcast. Anakin wanted to vomit.

 _“Now, Lord Vader, go and bring peace to the Empire,”_ the Supreme Chancellor told him.

“I can't watch any more,” Obi-Wan said inside the vision, tears welling up in his eyes. On the other side, the words released Anakin from his frozen horror and he turned away from the gateway, no thought in his mind but to drag himself and Obi-Wan away from this awful vision of the future. Obi-Wan’s grip on him had slackened, and he stumbled as he tried to pull him back towards the main pathway, falling back to the cool surface of the path.

Anakin only realized that he was weeping when he felt Obi-Wan’s hand between his shoulder blades. His partner hadn’t stood up; maybe he couldn’t. Instead, he was sprawled out beside him, and when Anakin looked up at him he saw that Obi-Wan’s face was streaked with silent tears.

He tried to take a deep breath, but that only gave him enough air to start sobbing. Something shifted in Obi-Wan’s presence, and he opened his arms to Anakin, who hitched himself close enough to press his face into his old master’s neck, clutching him for dear life as he hadn’t done in years.

When he was a child, Obi-Wan had been his rock. But now his partner was holding him just as tightly, and Anakin could feel his own tears soaking into the collar of his tunic.

He couldn’t seem to stop weeping, though the sobs did eventually trail off. He could feel himself shaking, but couldn’t get his body under control. “I don’t—” Anakin said, trying to take enough of a breath to speak. “Obi-Wan, I didn’t—”

“I know, Anakin.” Obi-Wan’s hand cradled the back of his head, warm and solid, but he knew that neither of them could say who was comforting whom. “I believe you.”

The hell of it was, Anakin realized, he did.

The war had changed them both, of course, but it was his marriage to Padmé that had put the most barriers between them. Obi-Wan being named to the Council had been part of it too, and as time passed there had risen, unspoken, more and more walls between them, Obi-Wan growing more tightly shielded after each new crisis. Anakin had wanted to reach out to him many times. But each time his own fear of discovery, and of Obi-Wan’s disapproval, had prevented him.

Now, though, he could feel Obi-Wan’s mind against his with startling clarity. The mutual trauma of the gateway had ripped their shields away, and he felt Obi-Wan’s absolute conviction, entwined with other, even stronger feelings. Hard up against them were his utter disbelief and horror, twin to his own.

Anakin forced himself to let go of Obi-Wan, his muscles aching with the force of his death grip. When he pushed himself to his feet and looked back at the gateway,he saw that the vision had continued.

“Send me to kill the Emperor. I will not kill Anakin,” Obi-Wan was telling Yoda, but the Grand Master shook his head.

“To fight this Lord Sidious, strong enough, you are not,” he said sternly, and on the other side of the portal Anakin felt some spark of indignation underneath his shock. Obi-Wan was the strongest Jedi he knew, and certainly the most dangerous.

The other Obi-Wan’s expression twisted with pain. “He is like my brother,” he said, and Anakin heard the plea in his words. “I cannot do it.”

Yoda was unmoved. “Twisted by the dark side, young Skywalker has become,” he said, with grim finality. “The boy you trained, gone he is…consumed by Darth Vader.”

Anakin turned away again as Yoda declared that he himself would go after Sidious. It was like a nightmare, but it wasn’t. The truth of that future rang in Anakin’s bones, a thousand hints and forebodings swirling together to reveal the path that he had been walking unknowingly for—how long? Since the Sand People on Tatooine, at least. A path that led straight to the Sith, and the slaughter of the Jedi, and him becoming everything he had sworn to destroy.

 _I won’t let it happen,_ Anakin thought, and he only realized he’d spoken outloud when Obi-Wan’s head snapped up. His blue gaze focused on Anakin like a man reaching for a life preserver from the crest of a wave. Deliberately, he took another breath and used his voice. “I won’t let it happen. I won’t turn. I’ll die before that happens—I’ll kill myself.” He took another breath. “Obi-Wan, I need you to promise me—”

But Obi-Wan turned his head away. “Anakin,” he said, sounding as wrung out and miserable as Anakin felt, “I can’t do that.”

“What do you mean, you can’t do that?” Anakin demanded. “You’re a Jedi! Hunting the Sith is what we _do_!”

Obi-Wan passed his hand over his face. “Anakin, I could no more kill you than I could cut out my own heart.” He nodded back toward the gateway. “You just heard me tell Yoda the same thing.”

Anakin stared at him, dumbfounded by this new shock. Obi-Wan was the perfect Jedi, undoubtedly one of the most dangerous men in the galaxy. He was the only living Jedi who had defeated a Sith Lord in single combat, the only Jedi in a thousand years who’d been Knighted in the field in recognition of that achievement. The idea that he couldn’t kill a Sith Lord just because that— _Vader_ —had once been his former apprentice was staggering.

He wanted to ask why, but the last thing he wanted was to push Obi-Wan to the point of rationality. “Why did the Force bring us here?” he asked instead. “Is the future unalterable?”

Obi-Wan took an unsteady breath. “It may be that we are being given a warning,” he said. “Or the knowledge we need to prevent these events.” He started back toward the main path, then stepped onto another juncture that led to another gateway across the expanse. Anakin followed him, though seeing anything more was the last thing he wanted to do. “If that gateway showed you your nightmare, perhaps we can find mine.”

The voices sounded again as they walked. _This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope._ A young woman, her voice unfamiliar but nevertheless striking a deep chord within him.

 _What you need, you already have. Unfortunately, you seem to be letting it all go._ The voice of an older man, and Anakin knew that he knew him, but he couldn’t think who it was.

 _In our arrogance, joined the conflict swiftly we did. Consumed by the dark side, the Jedi were_. Yoda again, still sounding—older?

 _Trust in the living Force_. Master Qui-Gon, one of the last things he’d said to Anakin before the Sith murdered him.

 _I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me_. A man’s voice, speaking lightly accented Basic.

Obi-Wan led them to another triangular gateway. As they approached, the line inside it glowed blue, and the blackness inside began to turn red. Anakin heard a young man’s voice speaking, unfamiliar but again with that deep resonance in his soul. _I will not turn…and you’ll be forced to kill me_.

Anakin put his hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder, gripping a little too tightly to be offering reassurance to Obi-Wan rather than taking it for himself. “We’re stronger together, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, and then the mist cleared to reveal a world of red.

His grip on Obi-Wan’s shoulder tightened further as he beheld himself— _Lord Vader_ —and Obi-Wan dueling in the middle of a river of lava, their lightsabers flashing almost as fast as thought. Unlike in the previous hologram, Vader now had the red eyes of the Sith, and he and Obi-Wan were battling all out, beyond hope, beyond redemption, beyond anything that might once have held them back. Even through the gateway, Anakin couldn’t help but cry out at the weight of the emotions that battered at him: anger, despair, hatred, and—love?

No sooner did he glance at Obi-Wan beside him than the Obi-Wan in the vision flipped backward out of the river of lava onto the top of the embankment. “It's over, Anakin. I have the high ground,” he said, pain written across his face and voice.

Glancing at the terrain from his vantage point on the battle, Anakin could see that he was telling the simple truth, but Vader was blinded by his arrogance and his rage. “You underestimate my power!” he shouted, and Obi-Wan’s expression crumpled further.

“Don’t try it,” he warned, but Vader didn’t listen. Instead, he jumped, and without hesitation or compunction Obi-Wan cut him off at the knees, then cut off his left arm with a twist of his wrists. It all happened so quickly that only a Jedi could have followed it. Inside his own numb horror, part of Anakin couldn’t help but remember that Obi-Wan had come to favor amputations lately.

Beside him, Obi-Wan’s blank horror was quicksand at the other end of their bond, threatening to drown them both. Anakin slung his arm around his shoulders, all but holding him up. He could only watch as Vader, in agony, tumbled down the scree to the edge of the lava flow, his glove and clothes starting to smoke.

“You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them. It was you who would bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!” Obi-Wan was all but screaming, and there were tears in his eyes.

 _“I hate you!”_ Vader screamed as Obi-Wan gestured, grabbing Anakin’s lightsaber out of thin air, then turned to walk away. After a few steps, he looked back.

“You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you.” It was an epitaph for his fallen apprentice, and for him. Whatever a being in absolute despair looked like, Obi-Wan was worse; the glimpse of his face visible as he walked out of the frame of the gateway looked like he was dead—or worse, that he wished he was. As the vision roiled from red to black, Anakin could see Vader left behind on the scree, beginning to burn.

Next to him on the path, Obi-Wan slid out of his grasp and fell to his hands and knees, looking as though he was going to be sick. “I did the same thing to Savage Oppress,” he said. “I would never—I couldn’t—” He looked up as Anakin knelt beside him. “I would never do that to you, Anakin,” he said, and Anakin was shocked to see that he was crying, slow tears tracking unnoticed down his cheeks. “I—you heard what I said. I love you.”

There was no way he could even begin knowing how to respond to that. “Master—” Anakin said, at a loss, then gave up and folded Obi-Wan into a hug. “You didn’t do it to me,” he said. “And you won’t. And that—that was Vader, anyway.” He wasn’t sure if Obi-Wan was even listening, but he kept his hand in his red-gold hair anyway, figuring that the contact in and of itself would be a comfort. He couldn’t help but relieve Obi-Wan’s final strokes in his mind. It was undoubtedly a cruel thing to do to one’s opponent, the kind of thing a Sith would do. It had been cruel to do it to Oppress; it was even worse to do it to Vader, however much more he deserved it.

After a while, Obi-Wan took a deep breath and straightened, looking at Anakin as if to reassure himself that he was still there. Gently, Anakin reached up and blotted away the last traces of Obi-Wan’s tears with his sleeve. “I hope that was enough of a nightmare for you,” he said, and stood up, giving Obi-Wan his hand.

Obi-Wan took it and rose, closing his eyes again briefly. “I fear we have only seen a fraction of the horrors that await us,” he said, sounding a little more collected than before, but whatever else he might have added was cut off by some kind of sound resonating through the space above them. Not a real sound, Anakin realized, but the Force itself, vibrating discordantly.

In the silence after the echoes died he heard, quite clearly, Ahsoka’s voice, older but unmistakable. _There is still a way_.

“I think we may be wearing out our welcome,” he said, but Obi-Wan shook his head.

“We still don’t know how Palpatine moves against the Jedi,” he said, and he turned back to the portal.

“How much more do we need to know?” Anakin asked. “It has to involve the clones—why else would the Sith have ordered their manufacture?”

Obi-Wan opened his mouth, then paused. “You’re right,” he said. “The Sith are trying to destroy us. And we picked up the weapon that they made for us for the purpose.”

Anakin was remembering Ahsoka, and the things Barriss had said to him as they’d dueled while Ahsoka’s fate hung in the balance. He glanced back at the gateway, and saw it clearing again; with a start, he recognized Ahsoka. She and Rex were diving for cover in some kind of urban square, other clone troopers turning their rifles on them. It was Mandalore: Anakin recognized the armored and helmeted warriors flying through the sky above while the city around them burned.

“Rex!” Ahsoka shouted over the noise of combat. “This Order 66—why didn’t you—?” She gestured at his helmet, and Rex shook his head.

“I heard what Fives said, about us being compelled to kill the Jedi someday,” he said, turning to return fire. “I didn’t want to believe it, but I guess it was true!”

Ahsoka frowned at him. “I can sense it—some kind of bio-chip—”

“Ahsoka Tano, what an unexpected pleasure!” a new voice said, and a sparkling black lightsaber entered the frame.

Ahsoka turned, baring her teeth as she ignited her lightsabers. “Come back for another defeat, Maul?”

The former Sith Lord drove his saber down and Ahsoka caught it between her blades, blue as though she were still a Jedi in truth—the color her lightsabers had turned after Anakin had given them a tune-up. “It’s not too late to join me, Ahsoka,” Maul told her as their blades flashed. “Together we can defeat Sidious and destroy Skywalker before he takes his place at the dark lord’s side.”

Ahsoka bared her teeth. “I will never join you!” Her face was the last thing Anakin saw as the frame of vision shuddered violently, dissolving in a whirl of black, shot through with an inimical blue that reminded him viscerally of Force lightning.

The thought was enough to persuade him. “Obi-Wan, we’re leaving,” he said, and began backing away from the portal, suddenly unwilling to put it behind him.

For once, Obi-Wan didn’t argue; Anakin could tell that he was spooked too. “I think you’re right.”

They had made it perhaps thirty meters back the way they’d come when the space within the portal seemed to shudder violently. This time it opened only onto darkness, and within that darkness was the now-familiar robed visage of the Sith Lord.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker,” Sidious said, relish and hatred mingling in his voice. “We meet at last. My old enemy, and my future apprentice.”

The last thing Obi-Wan had expected on this mission was meeting the architect of all their pain for the last decade and more, but on the other hand it did vindicate Anakin’s conviction about their jaunt downplanet. Obi-Wan inhaled, putting everything he’d just seen very firmly out of his mind as he stepped smoothly up to stand in front of his partner and a little to his right on the path. “So you show your face at last, Sidious,” he said, intending to draw the Sith Lord’s attention to give Anakin another few seconds to pull himself together. It seemed to work; Anakin palmed his saber, taking up a guard position but leaving the blade unignited.

The Sith Lord was a black hole in the Force. “I do not know where you are, or how you got there, but I see you clearly, _Jedi_ ,” Sidious sneered. “As clearly as I see my young friend. He shall be mine, and you will die, and so will your precious Jedi Order. It is inevitable. It has already happened.”

The sensation of his hatred was like a physical presence in this space without true dimensions, a great hand of malevolence trying to press Obi-Wan down. He doubted that he would have been able to bear up under it alone, but without thinking he reached out to Anakin. Instinct pushed him to drop the barriers he had grown accustomed to keeping in place between them, and he was rewarded when he felt Anakin’s presence beside him, meshing together as they hadn’t done in years. He too had put walls in place that now seemed too dangerous to maintain.

“More Sith lies,” Obi-Wan said, doing his best to sound bored. Despite popular misconceptions, it was usually difficult to frame words even over the deepest bonds between Jedi; feelings and images were easier, and Obi-Wan struggled to project his sense that they had to get out of here without giving anything away. They didn’t even know where or when Sidious was, for that matter; he could be years in the future that Obi-Wan had to believe could still be changed.

He felt a pulse of assent from Anakin, though, or at least his enduring willingness to follow where Obi-Wan led.

He couldn’t see most of Sidious’ expression, but he could hear the sneer in the Sith Lord’s voice. “Your arrogance betrays you, Kenobi. Isn’t that right, my friend?” He raised one hand, and Obi-Wan realized that, wherever and whenever the Sith Lord was on the other side of the portal, he wasn’t alone.

The monstrous form behind him looked like Death itself: nearly two meters tall, dressed in a black life support suit whose control panel blinked slowly on his chest as a black cape whipped behind him. The expression of the skeletal helmet was unchanging, but Obi-Wan could sense the icy presence of the other Sith Lord’s hatred and rage rolling toward him like a cold fog.

“Let me destroy Kenobi, my master,” the Sith apprentice said. Its—his—voice was artificial and deep, but not expressionless. As he spoke, he ignited a lightsaber that glowed the deep red of spilled blood. “His death belongs to me.”

“Patience, Lord Vader,” Sidious said, smiling at Obi-Wan from beneath his cloak. “The Jedi are already dead. They simply do not know it yet.” Vader turned his helmeted death mask of a head towards him, and the pure bolt of hatred he felt took Obi-Wan by surprise: still slowly pacing backwards, Obi-Wan tripped over his own feet.

He stumbled into Anakin, who caught him automatically, neither of them looking away from the two Sith Lords. “Brave words from a man who’s spent his life in the shadows,” Obi-Wan said when he’d gotten his breath back. Vader’s presence was making it difficult to think, his inimical will biting at the edges of Obi-Wan’s consciousness. If he hadn’t believed before that this creature of darkness had once been the good man Anakin Skywalker, he did now; it was a horrific redoubling of the bond he still shared with Anakin, the Sith Lord’s mental presence an awful weight on his soul. “The Sith were always cowards.”

“The Sith will destroy you, Jedi!”

Sidious raised his hands, and almost as fast as thought or Force lightning, the fire blew from the cauldron straight towards them.

Even afterwards, Obi-Wan was never able to say what made him do it. Rather than ignite his saber, as Anakin did just behind him, he simply raised his hands and caught the—Force-fire? Whatever it was—between them.

It felt physical, unlike real fire, but though it wasn’t particularly hot it was as inimical to him as Force lightning ever had been. Obi-Wan drew on the Force, which surrounded him completely even in this world between worlds, and slowly but surely willed the fire to dissipate, the blue flames flickering into nothingness as he raised his hands.

“ _Kenobi!_ ” Sidious shouted, hatred twisting his features, and Anakin jumped in front of him, catching a burst of true Force lightning on his ignited lightsaber. Obi-Wan put a hand on his shoulder, keeping him in place, then raised his hands to catch the other branch of it.

“Obi-Wan!” Anakin gasped, but all of Obi-Wan’s attention was on the energy in his hands, and on bending it to his will. Whether he absorbed it or simply reflected it he couldn’t say, but he planted a foot in front of him and stretched out his arms, sending the lightning back to its caster.

Of all things, Sidious clearly hadn’t expected it. The fire in the cauldron flickered as the Sith Lord raised a pair of red lightsabers, ducking until he could catch the remaining lighting on his own crossed blades. Obi-Wan saw Vader gesture furiously, raising his left forearm in a fist, but to no avail. The fire went out, and the blackness in the portal swallowed the vision of their enemies, the line of light around the inside edge fading back to white.

Anakin and Obi-Wan didn’t linger to see it. “Come on!” Obi-Wan snapped. Turning, they sprinted flat out for the wolf-door they’d come through.

“What in blazes was _that_?” Anakin asked, panting, as they ran, but Obi-Wan only shook his head.

“Not here!”

They took the door at a run, jumping through in unison without bothering to time it. Obi-Wan once again had the sensation of his mind expanding to hold the entire universe, and just as he was on the point of comprehending the pattern, he saw—

They were back on the packed ground outside the spire of the Lothal temple, all but flat-out in the dirt. There was probably a lesson in humility there, but Obi-Wan wasn’t minded to learn it. He picked himself up, brushing futilely at his tunics, and looked over at Anakin, who had a streak of dirt on his face. “How do we close this portal?” Obi-Wan asked, nodding to the wolves still trotting in a circle behind them.

“I don’t know,” Anakin said, but then he frowned, his expression going remote. “I—this way.”

He paced back around to the mural of the Mortis deities, then stood looking up at them. The sun hung lower in the sky and the breeze had picked up a little; Obi-Wan, chilled, tried to hitch his collar higher up his neck. He felt as though he’d been through the crusher, or that he might never be warm again.

Just as he was about to ask whether Anakin actually had any idea what to do, he took a deep breath and reached his left hand up to the left hand of the figure called the Father, which was now out of its original configuration, pointing towards the portal past the Son’s shoulder. Perhaps thirty seconds passed before Anakin stepped back and the mural flared again with golden light. This time, Obi-Wan clearly heard a voice that sounded familiar, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. _We are the middle, the beginning, and the end._

The Father, palm out, raised his hand so that he again stood with his palm up, while the Daughter lifted her head and turned to regard them as the wolves, howling, left their place around the portal to settle back down at the deities’ feet. Obi-Wan could have sworn that the convor on her shoulder winked at him.

“If we used the Son’s hand, I think that would destroy the whole temple,” Anakin said, breaking into his thoughts.

“That might be better than allowing it to fall into the hands of the Sith,” Obi-Wan said reluctantly. “If Sidious really is Palpatine, we shall have to doctor our mission reports to say that we were never here.”

“Well, we can at least put the temple back where we found it,” Anakin said, and he led the way to the emblem of the Order. They stretched out to the Force together, and slowly returned the Lothal temple to its earthen rest.

There was silence on the plain when they finished, broken only by the breeze in the grass and the chittering of the group of Loth-cats who were regarding them curiously from over near the flyer. A white one raised its head and then broke from the grass to rub itself against Obi-Wan’s legs, purring.

“My friend, I appreciate the gesture, but I’m afraid I don’t have time for this,” Obi-Wan told it, reaching down to try to separate it from his legs. The cat, undeterred, somehow kept purring and evaded his grasp at the same time.

Rather than continue nearly tripping over some combination of the cat and his own feet, Obi-Wan gave up and let the creature do what it wanted. Luckily, just then his comlink beeped, presenting him with an excuse for his decision.

“This is Kenobi,” he said, and Cody’s voice came to him over the channel.

_“Checking in as ordered, General. You’ve been on-planet for several hours now.”_

Obi-Wan glanced at Anakin, who didn’t meet his eyes The adrenaline of their encounter with the Sith had drained away, and Obi-Wan could almost feel Anakin’s presence shifting into defensiveness, the Force between them turning brittle with anticipation. “We’re almost finished, Commander. Anakin and I will be returning to the _Vigilance_ shortly.”

_“Acknowledged, sir.”_

The channel clicked off on Cody’s end, and Obi-Wan lowered his arm. “I too am reluctant to destroy the temple out of hand,” he admitted. “If the Sidious we saw was looking at us from our future, we may have years before he finds out about it.”

“At which point it won’t matter anyway,” Anakin said darkly. 

There was nothing Obi-Wan could say to that, but the Loth-cat at his feet looked up at him and, unmistakably, crooned. “Your furry friend seems pretty taken with you,” Anakin said, then let out a yelp when the cat leapt into his arms and started butting its head against his jaw. “Yes, okay, buddy, it’s good to meet you too—”

Shaking his head, Obi-Wan made his way over to the flyer, glad now that he’d heeded Anakin’s insistence that they take the craft down themselves as opposed to having clones escort them in a gunship. Right now, as much as he was dreading the conversation that would happen once they broke orbit, they needed to be alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Lothal Jedi Temple and the world between worlds appear in _Star Wars Rebels_.
> 
> With many thanks to cofax for a very thorough beta read of a partial draft, and to bessyboo for some Twitter handholding.
> 
> This story is a WIP; I currently have eleven chapters drafted and intend to post weekly-ish; ratings and other tags may change as the story goes along. I'm [on tumblr](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/), where you can check out [my tag for this AU](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/tagged/another-shot-at-life). I also put my playlist for this AU [on spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4my3R3mPZvPuH22MNbbHH9).


	2. The Well and the Lighthouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Haunted by visions, Ahsoka reaches out to an old ally for help.

The dreams had started a month ago, and had only grown more vivid with the passage of time; she could no longer ignore them. The only problem was that in the dreams, she clearly wasn’t alone, and Ahsoka Tano no longer had a brotherhood of Jedi to call on to accompany her.

She had walked away, and not a day had gone by in the eight months since that she didn’t reconsider that choice. But every time she thought about it, she came to the same conclusion: she couldn’t stay in an Order that had proven willing to put politics above its loyalty to her and its mission. Some things weren’t meant to be compromised.

But as she sat in Dex’s diner slowly eating a nerfburger early one afternoon, enjoying the sunlight—she hadn’t been this high up in weeks—it occurred to her that not every Jedi supported the war. And one of them in particular might be able to provide her with the companions she’d seen in her visions.

Dex ambled past her table as she was finishing the burger, dipping her fries in the remaining sauce on her plate. “How you doing, Ahsoka?” he asked, and Ahsoka summoned a smile. The honest answer was that she wasn’t doing so well—the odd jobs she’d been taking didn’t keep her in much cash, and she missed the weight of her lightsabers even as she knew that wearing them would have attracted far more attention than she wanted even if she’d had the choice. But Dex, who’d given her a hideout and a lot of free meals during her self-imposed exile, probably already knew all that.

“I’m okay,” she answered. “There isn’t a communications terminal in the back, is there?”

One good thing about Jedi investigators was that they didn’t bat an eye at the suggestion of meeting in an underworld bar. That evening, Ahsoka made her way to the Sleeping Rose, where she found the Jedi she’d wanted to talk to already waiting for her in a booth.

Master Tera Sinube didn’t look like he’d taken the war well, but then, no one really had. The Cosian seemed thinner than the last time they’d met, and she knew she wasn’t imagining his air of wariness. Ahsoka gave him a nod as she slid into the opposite side of the booth, meeting his eyes and his scrutiny in the Force forthrightly.

She didn’t blink; she wasn’t a darksider, and she didn’t owe anyone apologies or explanations. After a moment the pressure of his attention lifted, and he slid her an empty glass across the table.

“Would you like a drink, Commander Tano?”

Ahsoka’s lips twisted, but she poured herself a glass of whatever he was having from the bottle and took a cautious sip. Beer, not hard liquor. “Thank you,” she told him. “And thank you for agreeing to meet with me.”

“I can always make time for famous renegades,” Sinube said equitably. From his emotions in the Force, she didn’t think he meant it sarcastically, and she couldn’t help but feel relieved that he didn’t seem to want to discuss her resignation. “What seems to be the trouble?”

Ahsoka took a deep breath. There was no way to soften what she was about to say, and she didn’t like it anymore than she expected Sinube would once she told him. “I want you to loan me a detachment of younglings for a trip to Level 001.”

Sinube’s eyes narrowed, and when he saw that she was serious, he let out a snort, leaning forward slightly over the table. “That’s quite a request, Commander. Suppose you tell me why I should, in my capacity as an instructor of younglings, agree to such a thing.”

She told him about the visions, and about what she thought she was being called to do. Sinube listened attentively, asking economical questions at a few points. When she had finally finished, he sat back, shaking his head, his dreadlocks swinging. “You realize that very few people in the Order will take these visions seriously,” he told her, and Ahsoka suppressed a flinch. She remembered quite vividly the accusations against her in the Chamber of Judgment; she still had nightmares about them.

“I’m aware of that,” she replied, struggling to keep her tone neutral. “I’m also aware that you and some other masters don’t agree with the direction the Order has taken since the first Battle of Geonosis.” The idea that Sinube, by far the recusant Jedi with the highest profile outside the Order, might be willing to listen to her for that very reason was the only thing that had brought her here.

Sinube took a sip of his own beer. “You have me there, Commander,” he said after a moment, setting the glass back down. “Nor will I bother to pretend that I don’t already think that the Council doesn’t necessarily know what’s best for the Jedi. Very well. I shall meditate on your words and make you aware of my decision within two standard days.”

Ahsoka suppressed her disappointment; some part of her had thought, however irrationally, that he’d agree immediately. But that was the Jedi solidarity of her ideals, not reality. Realistically, this was probably the best outcome she could have expected.

“Thank you, Master,” she said, and stood up to go. This was one conversation she absolutely did not want to prolong. “You have my comm frequency.”

“I do,” he said, giving her a nod. She’d already turned away when his next words brought her up short. “Ahsoka—may the Force be with you.”

In her darkest moments, Ahsoka didn’t know whether the Force was still with her or not. She could feel it, of course, perhaps even slightly clearer than it had been in the Temple, though still suffused with the choking clouds of darkness that had descended since the war began. She had dim memories of the Force being different when she’d been a youngling, but sometimes they seemed even more unreal than her dreams.

She used the Force constantly, even though they’d taught her in the Temple that doing so outside the Order was a surefire way to risk the dark side. It wasn’t the only thing she’d been taught that had been wildly wrong. She meditated every day, too, trying to find the inner peace and clarity that it supposedly bestowed. She also kept up on her exercises, though not having her lightsabers meant she’d had to get creative in some of the workouts.

She had just finished one such session in her room above the garage at Nyx’s place on 1313 when Sinube commed, almost exactly forty-eight hours since she’d contacted him. “Master Sinube,” she said, pulling the comlink off her belt. “Thank you for getting back to me.”

“No thanks necessary, Commander,” he told her. “I have decided to agree to your request, on one condition: I will accompany you and the younglings to Level 001.”

The Cosian hadn’t been present in her visions. “Master Sinube, are you sure—”

“That’s my condition, Ahsoka,” Sinube interrupted. “Take it or leave it.”

There was a finality in his tone that brooked no argument, and Ahsoka swallowed the rest of her objections. “Very well, Master. When do you want to leave?”

“Meet us at the ventilation shaft twelve klicks east of the Temple Precinct at 0900 tomorrow. No time like the present.”

“I’ll see you then.” Ahsoka shut off the comlink and let out a sigh. More than anything else, since she’d left the Order she’d been seized by the unshakable feeling that time was swiftly running out.

Meeting the youngling squad again was about as awkward as she’d have predicted, if she’d ever thought such a thing would happen after her resignation. Zatt, Petro, Gungi, Byph, Ganodi and Katooni all regarded her as though she had acquired some kind of communicable disease, and the exuberant chatter she remembered from their trip to Ilum and misadventures with Grievous and the pirates were notably absent.

If Master Sinube thought the younglings’ subdued manner was worth remark, he gave no sign. Instead, he nodded to Ahsoka when she hopped into the shuttlebus, then indicated the spare pack on the bench next to him. “I took the liberty of securing you breathing equipment, Commander,” he said. “Level 001 is officially uninhabitable, and we don’t want to take any chances.”

Level 001 was officially little more than a myth, but Ahsoka didn’t have to tell him that. “Thank you,” she said, and took a seat on the bench next to Katooni, who flinched. Maneuvering the shuttle into the queue for the dropshaft, Sinube ignored them both.

It would take a little more than four hours for them to descend to the surface, if the surface even existed at Level 001. Ahsoka had heard many conflicting urban legends about it growing up in the Temple; belatedly, it occurred to her that the younglings might be subdued in the face of their destination, rather than her presence.

“I also brought you a service blaster,” Sinube said into the silence in the 5600s. “I know you lost your lightsabers before your trial.”

Most Jedi wouldn’t have seen a blaster as a compliment, but Obi-Wan had insisted that she be as proficient with a blaster as she was with a lightsaber or her hands, both of which she preferred. Anakin, who was a terrible shot with hand weapons, hadn’t objected.

If nothing else, she could sell the weapon in a pinch. “Thank you, Master.” Ahsoka strapped the holster around her waist, securing it to her thigh with the secondary strap. She tried to ignore the voice whispering that military-issue weapon or no, it was one step farther away from who she’d been in the Order.

Given what she was doing right now, and with whom, she felt like more of a Jedi than she had in a long time.

The younglings broke and started asking her questions about her life outside the Temple after about an hour. Ahsoka did her best to answer honestly, but without going into too many of the gory details: her fears, her money issues, Nyx’s problems with the gangs in his neighborhood, her own growing formless dread. From time to time she saw Master Sinube watching her out of the corner of his eye, but he made no objection aside from asking her to take over the shuttle controls in the second hour. He led the younglings through a series of lightsaber forms, then declared that he was going to take a nap. As he’d probably intended, most of the younglings followed suit.

Ganodi, however, came to sit next to Ahsoka in the copilot’s seat. “Padawan—Commander—” She hesitated, then pressed onward. “Is it true what Master Sinube said, that you had a vision about a darkness at the roots of the Temple?”

“It is true,” Ahsoka said, watching the altimeter tick slowly downward. This kind of tedium was the worst a pilot could ask for, requiring constant low-level attention on the unlikely chance that something would go wrong. They were in the lower 1000s now, and traffic was thinning out correspondingly, but that also meant that they were now vulnerable to unforeseen contingencies, as Obi-Wan would have said. “I saw all of you there with me, too.”

“What do you think it means?” Ganodi asked.

“I don’t know,” Ahsoka admitted. “I just know that I have to go down there and find out.”

Zatt woke her from her nap with a hand on her shoulder in the 400s. Ahsoka sat up, coming instantly awake as she had learned to do when she’d gone to war. The younglings were sorting through their gear, while Master Sinube had resumed the controls up front, assisted by Ganodi. The gloom now was so thick that they could see only a few dozen meters in front of them, despite the fact that he had turned the external lights all the way up.

“Do you sense it?” he asked her quietly when she came forward to sit in the copilot’s seat.

Ahsoka didn’t have to ask what he meant; she could feel a coldness in the Force around her, reminding her of icy fog rolling in. “Yes,” she said. “It’s coming from—down, and back towards the Temple.”

Master Sinube’s normally pleasant expression had turned grim. “I concur. I had hoped, Commander, that you were wrong.”

“You were willing to come all the way down here despite that?” Ahsoka asked.

“One thing I’ve learned is that it never pays to ignore a lead in an investigation.” He looked at her, the ghost of a smile flitting across his face. “Or as Master Yoda would say, face our fears, we must.”

Ahsoka nodded tightly. She didn’t like to think about Yoda.

The levels grew strange below 200—their heights were irregular, and the sides of the dropshaft were overgrown with uncanny plants, mosses and ferns that glowed faintly in the endless night of the city planet’s underground. Below 100, the courses looked to be made of stone, and Ahsoka found herself wondering how Coruscant bore its own weight.

Level 001 was easily one hundred meters high, its vents to the dropshaft looking like doors to some great forgotten hall. Sinube and Ahsoka turned the shuttle back in the direction of the Temple high above, navigating through a combination of reaching out to the Force and dead reckoning based on maps of the Temple precinct.

They were forced to abandon the shuttle about two klicks away from what their maps and their sense of the Force told them was their destination. While Sinube powered down the ship, Ahsoka went back into the main compartment, where the younglings were waiting.

“Everyone, I need you to listen to me,” she told them. “We don’t know what we’ll find where we’re going, so I want you to stay behind me. Keep your lightsabers ready, and stick together.” Sinube came forward, adjusting his rebreather, and caught her eye; the shuttle was evidently as secure as it was going to get.

“All right,” Ahsoka said, putting her own rebreather and goggles in place before hitting the door controls. “Then let’s go.”

She was prepared for the darkness and the noxious air; she held up her handlight, while the younglings behind her ignited their lightsabers. She wasn’t prepared for the cold, and the distinct sense of malice from the walls of the chamber around her, dimly sensed in the distance.

“It’s cold here,” Petro announced, staring around.

“Reach out to the Force,” Master Sinube suggested gently. He hit the control to close the shuttle door, then lifted his own glowrod.

Ahsoka already knew that they had to go through the triangular portal directly ahead of them. Taking as deep a breath as she could through the rebreather, she stepped forward with a confidence she didn’t feel.

The tunnel, however, was short; after perhaps a dozen meters it opened into a vast columned chamber, lit softly by phosphorescent mosses. Ahsoka halted just outside the tunnel, waiting for everyone to emerge. She could just dimly make out chunks of monumental statues, their features worn down by time but still giving her no good feelings.

“Do you feel that?” Katooni asked suddenly. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t want us here.”

“It’s the dark side of the Force,” Ahsoka told them, shining her handlight on the starburst emblem carved into a nearby tumbled chunk of rock. “This place was a stronghold of the Sith.” She looked ahead, stretching out with all her senses, but the Force was so choked with darkness that she could get only the most fragmentary impressions. Watchfulness, malice, anger, fear. “Come on.”

They walked slowly over the broken ground, which gradually gave way to paved stonework, now mislaid and irregular after centuries or millennia. Ahsoka expected the ancient emblem of the Order, but saw instead that the central paved yard was graven with the ancient light side four-lobed emblem she knew from her youngling classes and from Mortis. “Do you see that?” she asked Sinube, who nodded.

“This must be the foundations of the Temple,” he said, hoisting his glowrod several meters above his head with the Force. In the gloom, she could just make out four immense pillars rising towards the unseen ceiling, incised with the ancient emblem of the Jedi. She recognized the design for Force-channeling architecture that she’d studied as a youngling. Beyond the pillars, she dimly glimpsed what she realized was the foot of the mountain that was the base of the Temple itself.

“What’s that?” Zatt asked, pointing towards the central area between the pillars, and they all turned to look. The coldness she’d felt seemed to grow stronger under the weight of her attention.

She swallowed. “Let’s find out.”

The area between the four pillars had clearly been meant to be visited: carved steps led up to the crest of a shallow bowl, and carved steps led down to a small plaza dominated by what Ahsoka immediately recognized was intended to be a capstone. The massive block was graven in turn with the emblems of the light side and the Jedi Order in a repeating pattern. But rather than a sense of light, it gave off what she could only describe as darkness visible, the miasma of the dark side present before her eyes as a weltering blackness in the air.

Gungi roared, expressing his displeasure at the pain, and Ahsoka felt Byph groping for her hand. She squeezed it back, then let go.

“This is not safe for the younglings!” Master Sinube said from the top of the bowl.

He was clearly right. Ahsoka raised her voice. “Everyone, turn around.”

She waited until all of them were heading up the stairs before turning her back on the capstone, which she had to steel herself to do. All of her instincts screamed that it was an abomination in the Force, that it was her duty to—what? Ahsoka searched her feelings for the answer, but couldn’t come up with anything.

She wasn’t even a Jedi any longer; what right did she have to interfere? Why was she down here anyway? Who did she think she was?

Sinube looked into her face as she crested the bowl; he’d waited to let the younglings precede him down. “It’s the dark side, Ahsoka,” he told her, and she felt him putting conviction into his voice and the Force. “Don’t give in to its fear and doubt.”

Ahsoka blinked; she’d nearly forgotten that the waves of cold despair rising within her had an external source. “You’re right,” she said, and took a deep breath, trying to clear her mind of the flotsam the dark side energy was stirring within her.

The younglings were clustered around a large chunk of fallen masonry when she and Sinube descended, and she didn’t need the Force to sense their fear. “Master Sinube, what does this mean?” Byph asked. “Why is the dark side at the foundations of the Temple?”

Sinube sighed. “Millennia ago, after the Sith were driven off Coruscant by the Jedi, they made an incursion in force and established a beachhead here, a shrine to the dark side. When the Jedi returned and built the Temple, they did so over that shrine, to contain its energies. But now that cap seems to be leaking, as you see.”

“But if it’s built to channel the Force—” Zatt began, and then shut his mouth abruptly.

“Yes,” Ahsoka said, answering the question he hadn’t been able to voice. “It’s channeling that dark energy into the Temple, and the Order.” She and Sinube looked at each other over the younglings’ heads: if the capstone had been leaking for centuries, there was every chance that it was responsible for at least some of the Jedi’s clouded perception over the last few decades.

“So what do we do?” Ganodi asked.

“‘We’ don’t do anything,” Sinube said, in his best “teaching younglings” tone. Ahsoka recognized it from her own days as a Temple child; here in the subterranean darkness it was comforting, rather than painful. “We’re going to go back to the surface and tell the Council. They will decide what to do.”

Ahsoka crossed her arms over her chest. The Council had precisely zero resources to spare to anything that wasn’t the war; it didn’t take a seer to know that they would file this revelation under the “interesting but not immediately relevant” column and most likely forget about it. In their arrogance, they could hardly do anything else.

And her instincts were screaming at her that they had a reason for being down here, a reason that wasn’t yet clear.

Her thoughts were interrupted by an avian screech from above. Unthinking, Ahsoka looked up and held out her arm; as if she’d trained for it, a green convor spiraled down from the darkness above them, landing on her leather vambrace and curling its tail around her forearm.

Everyone stared. “What is a convor doing here?” Petro asked, suspicious. “And how’s it breathing?”

Ahsoka reached out, stroking the convor’s feathered head. “This is Morai,” she said slowly, not knowing how she knew the name, only that she did. “She’s a friend of mine.”

“You’ve met before, Ahsoka?” Sinube asked.

“Yes,” Ahsoka answered. “On Mortis. She saved my life.” She didn’t remember everything that had happened there—most of it had come back to her in dreams after the fact. Master Obi-Wan didn’t even seem to believe that it had really happened, and Anakin hadn’t wanted to talk about it. But she did remember the convor looking at her as she lay at the foot of a tree, beneath a starry sky.

The Force whispered a warning, and Sinube inhaled sharply. The younglings’ fear spiked suddenly just as Morai beat her wings, screeching a battle cry. The floor was beginning to rumble, increasingly strongly, and Ahsoka sensed another presence near them, as if a switch had been flipped.

In the near distance, one of the statues was uncurling into a skeletal, spiny monster form, straightening and standing. Its inimical intent was clear even though the miasma of the Force around them.

“A guardian of the shrine,” Sinube said, his voice and presence in the Force deliberately calm. “Younglings, lightsabers at the ready.”

Ahsoka transferred Morai to her shoulder, the convor’s claws digging into her skin through her jumpsuit, then loosened her blaster in its holster. The monster statue was slowly turning its spiny head to regard them; it was at least four meters tall. “Why would the Jedi leave that thing down here?” she asked, and turned her head sharply when the convor screeched at her again. “Morai, tell me something useful!”

Her hands itched for a lightsaber, but the glow of the younglings’ blades at least dispelled the gloom a little better as the guardian lumbered toward them, its steps ponderous as stone. “What does it want?” Zatt demanded, his voice rising in panic.

“We’ve disturbed the shrine,” Ahsoka answered, trying to clear her mind. She knew they couldn’t leave, but she couldn’t think why. “It doesn’t want Jedi here, we aren’t Sith. We don’t belong.”

Sinube paced forward to stand in front of the younglings, drawing his lightsaber from within its cane as he straightened, filled with the Force. A Jedi Master had resources none of the rest of them did. “Stay behind me, younglings,” he ordered. “Ahsoka, see what it does if you shoot it.”

That seemed like a terrible idea, but Ahsoka didn’t have any better ones. She drew her blaster and put three shots in the statue’s head; it barely reacted as the bolts struck chips off the stone.

“It’s not working!” Katooni sounded none too calm herself.

Ahsoka winced as the convor dug its claws into her shoulder, chattering at her agitatedly when she turned to regard it. Her attention on her avian friend, she barely registered Petro breaking ranks to rush the guardian.

“Petro, no!” Sinube shouted, but it was too late. The human youngling took a surprisingly athletic leap to the guardian’s knee, raising his saber as he prepared to slice through one of its long arms. But it took so much concentration that he failed to notice the statue’s other arm, batting him aside as if he were little more than vermin. He hit the ground with a heavy thud, and didn’t get up again.

Byph and Gungi screamed, and Ahsoka felt the spark of Petro’s consciousness fade, though he seemed to only be knocked out, not dead. _Should have gone for the legs_ , Ahsoka thought, and then she was running in a battlefield crouch to his side. The youngling was still breathing, though she couldn’t tell the extent of his injuries. She plucked his lightsaber from where it had fallen next to him and stood up, ignoring the pang of loss when she heard the familiar snap-hiss of the blade igniting.

The guardian was nearly on top of the younglings now, and Sinube was directing them to fan out in an arc, preparing to harry its feet. Ahsoka flipped Petro’s blade into her preferred reverse grip and took the distance between her and the statue at a run, throwing herself into a somersault to land in a crouch on the spines of its back.

Somehow it sensed her presence. Its head turned to regard her with a harsh grinding noise, and Ahsoka felt its slow malice and bitter hatred even as she ducked the great stone hand it swung at her, trying to shake her off. Instead, she reached out to the Force and kept climbing up its spines, smiling to herself when she heard Morai’s screech of challenge. The convor was harrying the statue, pecking at its eyes and head as though it were flesh, not stone.

“Ahsoka, the neck!” Sinube shouted from below her, and she gritted her teeth, scrabbling to get her feet under her to get the leverage she needed for the swing. Her first blow went wide and she nearly fell off the statue’s back, dangling from the spine of its shoulders with the hand that wasn’t holding Petro’s blade. But she managed to get the lightsaber up in time to block another swipe of a stone hand, which sheared off in pieces as it met the energy of the blade.

The statue roared, its cry of pain and anger as much felt in the Force as it was physical. Ahsoka took advantage of its distraction: she got her feet under her on its back and hauled herself into a crouch on its shoulders. Straightening, she swung the blade with both hands directly into its neck. One more blow, and the energy animating the statue died abruptly. Ahsoka leapt clear as it collapsed, rolling when she hit the ground and coming up in a three-point crouch with the blade held out to her side. The wash of blue light showed the younglings, still mostly in formation on Sinube with their blades up. Morai was circling above them, a scolding note in her chattering.

“There will be more of them,” Ahsoka warned, straightening, and Sinube nodded.

“I concur. We must leave immediately.”

Ahsoka shook her head. “Not yet.”

“What about Petro?” Byph exclaimed.

“He’s still breathing,” Ahsoka said. “We’ll get him back to the Jedi Temple as soon as we can. But first we have to do what we can about _that_.” She nodded towards the capstone, and Sinube’s eyes narrowed as he glanced between her and the convor.

“Commander Tano,” he said slowly, “do you know what you’re doing?”

“No,” Ahsoka admitted. “But I have a pretty good hunch. Younglings, on me.”

Keeping the lightsaber ignited against the shadows, she leapt lightly over the pile of rubble that had been the guardian, leading the way back up the steps to the capstone bowl. When they saw that Sinube wasn’t objecting, the younglings followed her.

Ahsoka paced around the capstone until she stood opposite them. Above her, Morai dropped out of the shadows and landed on her left shoulder, chittering softly. “Everyone, form a circle,” she told them. “Then I need you to hold hands. Ganodi, give me your lightsaber.”

The Rodian girl handed over her blade, which Ahsoka spun into the obverse grip. Sinube shut down his own blade and joined the circle across from her, standing between Gungi and Katooni and taking their hands.

She put one foot on the capstone’s first riser as the younglings closed the circle behind her. She could feel the weight of their attention in the Force, but it was support, not scrutiny. Behind and above them, however distant, was the Order, a bulwark that had stood for millennia, even if it hadn’t stood for her. “I need you to reach out to the Force,” Ahsoka told them, putting her other foot on the riser. Each step felt like walking through mud. “Think of the light side. Let it fill you and channel it through yourself, into me.”

She hadn’t lied; she didn’t know what she was doing. But she did as she had instructed the younglings, opening herself to the Force fully, striving for the light side. She wasn’t a Jedi any longer, but the Jedi didn’t control the Force. They were its servants, not its masters, and here in this place she could act in their stead as an agent of the balance, and the light.

Morai’s crooning filled her ears as she closed her eyes, disregarding what her vision was telling her in favor of stretching out to her companions. She felt the small flames of the younglings and Sinube’s banked fire, and she felt the energy of the light singing between all of them, focusing on her. In the Force it was a tool for her to use, no less a weapon than her lightsaber, and she let it fill her, suffusing her with the power of the light side, a power that the darkness knew not, and could never break.

With a wordless cry, Ahsoka opened her eyes and drove Ganodi’s lightsaber deep into the capstone, letting it channel the light that was now visible around all of them, glowing with ever increasing radiance in the eternal night of subterranean Coruscant. The darkness welling from the shrine was a physical presence as she forced it back, stepping up to the capstone’s second riser as though she were climbing a mountain with the blue lightsaber held in front of her. At the last, she took the blade in both hands and held it high above her head, joining it to meet the pillar of light that burst from the ceiling above her, channeling it through her body into the hilt of the green lightsaber still embedded in the stone.

How long she strove with the darkness, driving it out with the blazing light, she had no idea. But when the light faded and she lowered her arms and shut down the blue lightsaber, she saw that the darkness was gone too. The air was clear, and the Force felt clearer too.

On her shoulder, Morai was fluffing her feathers in a very satisfied way. Ahsoka withdrew Ganodi’s lightsaber from the capstone and deactivated it before tossing it to her. “Now we can leave,” she told Master Sinube, smiling. She was still smiling when she took a step down from the capstone and passed out.

Getting the panicky younglings, an injured Petro, and an unconscious former padawan commander back to the shuttle was unquestionably challenging, but Tera Sinube had handled worse in his long career. Gungi proved strong enough to hoist Ahsoka over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, as there was nothing wrong with her aside from the fact that she was still glowing faintly. Tera had quite clearly seen the stars in her eyes before she collapsed.

Petro was a bit more of a challenge, and in the end, Tera resorted to floating him through the air in a display of Force abilities that would have been gauche in other circumstances. Ganodi and Zatt took point, with Byph and Katooni bringing up the rear behind Gungi with Ahsoka. If they survived this, they’d all have quite the story to tell.

As they entered the tunnel back to the shuttle he distinctly felt, but didn’t mention to the younglings, at least two other guardians’ presences stirring behind them, as though in a restless sleep. The power of the shrine had evidently been broken, but not wholly extinguished. For the time being, Tera could only hope that as the dark side energy drained away the sentinels would lose consciousness too.

He directed Ganodi and Zatt to power up the shuttle while Katooni and Byph assisted him with laying out Ahsoka and Petro at one end of the cabin. Ahsoka he merely covered with an emergency blanket from the medkit, but Petro appeared to have broken an arm and his lack of consciousness almost certainly indicated a concussion, though he didn’t appear to have spinal injuries. Gungi splinted his friend’s arm, then covered him with the other emergency blanket while Tera reached out to the Force to channel some of it into the human youngling. He was no great shakes at healing, but in these circumstances every little bit helped.

“Ganodi, if we’re ready, you may take off,” he called up the cabin while he did so.

Her worry was vibrating distinctly through the Force around her. “What about Ahsoka’s convor?”

That Morai was clearly no normal bird, and she could clearly take care of herself. “I don’t think we need to worry about her,” Tera told the Rodian youngling, projecting calm as best he could. “But Petro needs medical attention.” He glanced around. “Everyone else, please take a seat and strap in.”

Even at the maximum ascent speed, it would still be another three hours until they reached the Temple, but there was no question that Petro needed to be taken to the healers as soon as possible. Tera knew that he should have objected to Ahsoka’s plan to stay, but in the moment there had been no gainsaying her.

How he was going to explain any of this to the Council was a very good question. Ahsoka’s presence on the trip—let alone the fact that she’d been its instigator, and that she had just displayed a light side ability that was ostensibly known only to the most rarified masters in the Order’s history—wasn’t going to make that any easier.

Well, there was no reason the paperwork had to be filed immediately. Given the press of the war, it wasn’t as though the Council would see it any time soon no matter when he submitted his report.

Tera let out the breath he’d been holding with a sigh, smoothing Petro’s hair over his forehead with one claw. “You did well, everyone,” he said, slowly getting up out of his crouch. Katooni handed him his cane, and he gave her a nod of thanks. “I believe we accomplished what Ahsoka came here to do, and that we have been a great help to the Order today.”

“There were stars in her eyes,” Ganodi said quietly as he came forward to take the pilot’s chair from her. The Rodian youngling sounded impressed, but not awed, and that was all to the good; the last thing he needed was for the younglings to get the idea that what they’d seen was in any way alarming.

“I saw them too,” Tera agreed. “What did it feel like to you?”

She hesitated. “It felt like—like being back in the creche. Like I was surrounded by light.”

It was as good a description as any, Tera thought. Whatever that convor was—who had ever heard of a green convor?—it was clearly associated with the light side of the Force somehow. He didn’t support the war, but he still read the unclassified reports, and there had never been even the slightest hint that Ahsoka Tano had been capable of such things before she left the Order.

He didn’t know what it all meant, and he was quite certain that six months ago he would have caught nine kinds of hell from Yoda for even entertaining the thought of heeding Ahsoka’s visions and taking younglings along on an obviously dangerous wild bantha chase; the Grand Master had traditionally been extremely involved in the younglings’ upbringing and education. But that had been before Yoda’s strange, furtive trip away from the Temple, the details of which were only available to those with a councilor’s security clearance. Candidly, Tera didn’t know that he actually cared where the Grand Master had gone, or why; his increasing detachment from the Order, the result of it, was painfully obvious.

In the back, Katooni was supervising the distribution of ration packs, and Tera carefully opened the shuttle’s throttle wider, increasing the speed of their ascent. He remembered a very different Order, and a very different Force; he was aware that a change was coming, some new era about to begin. Most of the remaining recusant Jedi—and there were far fewer than there had been at the start of the war three years ago; suicide and suspicious accidents had claimed too many—felt it too, and Tera privately thought that it was fear of the future that had motivated at least some of the recusants to take their own lives.

What form the Jedi would take in that new era he did not know. But after today he was certain that Ahsoka Tano would be one of the ones to shape it, whether she knew it or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy May the Fourth!
> 
> This chapter is a riff on some of the planned episodes that were discussed at The Clone Wars and Ahsoka's Untold Tales panels at Celebration in 2015 and 2016. Nyx Okami was the mechanic Ahsoka wound up helping in the original draft of the walkabout arc. You can see concept art for the ruined Sith shrine at the foot of the Temple [in this post](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/post/173354879099/thewhills-ruins-beneath-the-coruscant-jedi).
> 
> I'm [on tumblr](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/), where you can check out [my tag for this AU](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/tagged/another-shot-at-life). I also put my playlist for this AU [on spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4my3R3mPZvPuH22MNbbHH9).


	3. Path of the Jedi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our actions define our legacy.

There was silence in the flyer after they broke atmosphere, interrupted only by the background noises of any space-capable vessel. Anakin had been flying for so long that he only noticed them in moments like this, moments when he was really trying not to say anything.

Beside him in the copilot’s seat, Obi-Wan was a blank in the Force, which was disconcerting after the way they’d been thrown open to each other in the world between worlds. Anakin couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but he could guess, and after everything they’d just seen the familiar inscrutable mask on his oldest friend’s face irritated him to no end.

Suddenly he just wanted it all over with, one way or the other. He’d spent four years avoiding this conversation, and now that it was here he just wanted to _know_. “Obi-Wan,” he asked, taking his hands off the controls so he could turn in his seat, “why didn’t you tell me?”

Obi-Wan made a noise of frustration and turned to him, clasping his hands on his knees. “Anakin, I could say the exact same thing to you.”

Anakin eyed him. “I asked first.”

“But what were you referring to?” Obi-Wan asked pointedly, and Anakin threw up his hands.

“Fine!” he snapped. “Fine. Why didn’t you tell me that you knew that Padmé and I are married?”

“Anakin, everyone knows that you and Padmé—” Obi-Wan stopped talking, staring at him open-mouthed. “You’re _what_?”

Anakin wasn’t sure he’d ever seen him look that shocked. “We’re married,” he said. “We have been since just after First Geonosis. Wait—you _didn’t_ know?”

Obi-Wan sat back in his seat, putting a hand over his eyes. “I knew you two were having an affair,” he said, in the tone of someone who was annoyed at having to discuss the obvious. “Everyone knows that, Anakin. But I didn’t know you were a— _married_!”

One of the things about arguing with Jedi was that you could usually perceive what they hadn’t said. _A heretic_ , Anakin heard clearly in the Force, and he couldn’t suppress his flinch. It was true that marriage was an obvious attachment, and attachments were against the Code. It was part of why he’d gotten into the habit of thinking that, in the hazy someday when the war was over, he’d wind up leaving the Order. It was part of why he’d resisted Obi-Wan’s increasingly unsubtle attempts to talk about it over the course of the war.

Though in all honesty, the thought of not being a Jedi was fundamentally incomprehensible. Even Jedi who left the Order were still Jedi—unless they became a Sith like Dooku, and even his dark apprentice Ventress had turned back to the light side of the Force eventually, just as her lover Quinlan Vos had been redeemed. Anakin was a Jedi Knight, and they couldn’t strip that from him even if he did leave; it was a seal on his soul that was irrevocable. Thinking otherwise made about as much sense as the idea of Obi-Wan, the quintessential Jedi, not being able to kill a Sith.

“Well, we are,” Anakin said. Normally he took pride in that, but now he just felt dejected. “Put it in your report to the Council.”

Obi-Wan looked up sharply, his hurt clear in the Force and on his face. “I wouldn’t do that. I have kept your secret, Anakin. The Council strongly suspects your involvement with Padmé, but does not know for sure. And even if they did,” he added after a beat, sounding reluctant, “you’re too good a Jedi to lose over breaking the Code.”

“At least as long as the war is on,” Anakin agreed, bitter. “What will they do when they find out you’ve been keeping the truth from them?”

He felt the conviction in Obi-Wan’s next words. “I don’t care, Anakin. It isn’t the first time I’ve put you before the Code and the Order—and if what we saw is any indication, it won’t be the last.”

Anakin blinked, suddenly feeling that he was swimming in deeper waters than he knew. “What do you mean, it isn’t the first time? Obi-Wan—what are you talking about?”

Now his partner looked distinctly shifty, and Anakin braced himself for the familiar cocktail of half-truths and misdirections. But Obi-Wan’s next words seemed if anything painfully honest. “I’m sure you recall that you were once set on leaving the Order, a few years after you joined,” he said slowly. “At the time, Yoda asked me what your departure would mean for the promise I made to Qui-Gon. And I told him that—I would leave the Order with you and complete your training outside it, if it came to that.”

There was total silence in the cockpit for the space of two breaths, and then Anakin was on his feet as though he’d been scalded, staring down at him. “Obi-Wan, you can’t be serious,” he said, hearing his own voice gone high and thin with panic. “Leaving the Order? For _me_? What about—what about the Jedi, the Council, the Republic?” _What about your soul?_ he didn’t say, but from Obi-Wan’s flinch he knew that he’d caught the thought.

It was an article of faith among Jedi that those who left the Order eventually went dark, though Anakin had looked up the numbers after Barriss Offee’s arrest and found that the actual evidence was ambivalent on that point. Most of the Lost Twenty, whose statues were granted pride of place in the Jedi Archives, had died in obscurity; a few had joined other Force orders like the Guardians of the Whills. He’d heard Yoda and many of the older masters say many times that Jedi were never meant to be alone, that they couldn’t exist without the Order; and though he’d questioned many of the things they’d said over the years, he’d never questioned that.

The realization that Sidious had to be counting on it left a sour taste in his mouth.

Obi-Wan glanced away. “Despite what you may think, this isn’t all about you, Anakin.” He sounded calm, but Anakin could sense the tension behind his placid demeanor in the Force. “I was prepared to leave the Order at least once before you were even born.”

He had to mean the infamous Mandalore mission. “But that was for Duchess Satine,” Anakin said. He regretted it immediately when Obi-Wan flinched again at the name, pain shadowing his features and his presence. It had been nearly a year since she’d died, and the wound was still raw. “Someone you—someone you were in love with.”

Obi-Wan looked up at him, clearly trying to summon his usual sardonic air and failing wretchedly. “Indeed,” he said, meeting his gaze, and then the creditcoin dropped and Anakin sagged back as he realized what he meant. He missed the chair almost entirely and half-fell, half-sat down heavily on the floor. This went quite beyond _He is like my brother_ —or at least he assumed it did. Anakin Skywalker didn’t actually know a damned thing about brothers or fathers, which was how he’d once told Padmé he viewed his relationship with his old master. Looking back, and forward, both his and Obi-Wan’s phrasings seemed to be attempting to cover the same emotional chasm with similarly poor camouflage.

Now it was his turn to put a hand over his eyes. “We can put _that_ under my original question. Master, I—why me?” _How long?_ he wanted to ask, but he thought he knew the answer. Since he’d been Knighted nearly four years ago, when everything had changed. He and Obi-Wan had lived in each other’s pockets as master and padawan for ten years before that, and thanks to the war they had kept up the habit since. He knew that for Obi-Wan, like many Jedi of his generation, sex was somewhere between an easy expression of affection and a purely physical enjoyment. He’d had many lovers in the Order while Anakin had been his apprentice, and more than a few outside it, too.

Some part of Anakin had always wondered whether Obi-Wan would ever make a pass at him, after he’d been Knighted and it was no longer inappropriate; hell, there’d been quite a few times, coming off any number of battlefields, when he’d thought they could both use the stress relief. But he hadn’t, and now it all made sense.

“I don’t know, Anakin.” Obi-Wan sounded deeply tired. “You’ve always believed Padmé to be your destiny. I suppose that you are mine.”

Right, because _that_ wasn’t a terrifying burden. Anakin clearly couldn’t be trusted with his own soul; the idea that he had Obi-Wan’s in his keeping as well, unknowing, was downright frightening.

But maybe it was another part of what he needed to set himself straight. He’d always thought—well, obviously Obi-Wan cared for him, that was how masters felt about padawans, and he knew that Obi-Wan had put his own reputation in the Order on the line for him many times before and after his Knighthood. But the idea that Jedi High General Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, member of the Council, would place Anakin Skywalker, an Outer Rim nobody with delusions of grandeur, above the Order to which he’d dedicated his life was staggering. His belief otherwise had impelled him to keep many, many secrets from Obi-Wan since the war started, had kept him from reaching out to his friend on numerous occasions. And he knew, with absolute conviction, that Vader hadn’t known.

Vader had believed, as Anakin had until a few hours before, that Obi-Wan was one stray thought about his relationship with Padmé from disowning him completely, in the name of the Jedi. Vader had been too selfish to make the choice he was obligated to make by his own freely accepted obligations, to even acknowledge the choice existed at all—just as Anakin had been. He still didn’t like that choice, still thought there should be a way that Jedi responsibilities and attachments could be made compatible; it hadn’t just been a pickup line on that refugee ship with Padmé. But after what they had just seen he couldn’t pretend that the choice didn’t exist.

But if Obi-Wan was willing to prioritize his own attachments above the Order, if not perhaps completely above the Code—even that much ultimately meant that Anakin wasn’t the only heretic on this ship. And that was—bizarrely comforting. They always had been stronger together.

_Love is never a mistake_ , Padmé said in his head, and the thought dislodged an old memory of his mother telling him a Tatooine fairy tale. He couldn’t really remember her voice very well anymore, just the sense of it and of the love he’d felt from her. _Many waters cannot quench love_ , Shmi had told him. _Neither can the floods drown it_.

The thought of Shmi and Tatooine led to the other thing he’d done just before First Geonosis that Obi-Wan didn’t know about, and even now some part of Anakin shied away from the idea of telling him. Maybe that was the thing that would cause Obi-Wan to repudiate him.

But that was cowardice speaking, the same cowardice that Obi-Wan had flung back in Sidious’ face. If he was a Jedi—and he blasted well still was, marriage and massacre be damned—then he had to start acting like it.

And if Obi-Wan had still loved Vader after everything, hearing that Anakin had once slaughtered a tribe of Tusken Raiders honestly probably wasn’t going to change his mind now.

“I shouldn’t be,” Anakin told him, feeling his shoulders slump against the side of the compartment. Suddenly getting up didn’t seem worth the effort. “Obi-Wan, you don’t—you don’t deserve me, and you definitely don’t deserve that— _Vader_.” Saying the name took an effort; it brought back the hellscape of their duel, and the fathomless hatred in the Sith Lord’s eyes. Anakin knew he had a temper; he knew that his behavior was far short of what a Jedi should be. But to see all of his worst parts displayed with pride by someone wearing his face—by someone who _was_ him, or could be, however much he wanted to deny it—was incontrovertible proof of just how bad he could go. Of just how far he’d slid without even realizing it.

And that not becoming Vader was worth whatever cost. Even if it meant his own life. Even if that meant Obi-Wan walking away from him, or Padmé. For the first time, he had to wonder whether they’d be better off without him: Vader had apparently destroyed them both.

Obi-Wan made an inarticulate sound of protest. “Anakin, that is not how it works. You don’t get to tell me that I deserve someone better. I don’t, and it doesn’t matter anyway; Padmé would say the same. She loves you.” _I love you_ , he didn’t say, but Anakin heard the words in the Force between them anyway.

“It does matter,” Anakin insisted. “You and Padmé do both deserve better. I never wanted—I only ever wanted you two, and to be a Jedi.” He leaned forward to put his head in his hands. “I guess I know now why Palpatine has been hinting to me that you two have been having an affair.”

He felt Obi-Wan’s spike of surprise, though his expression didn’t change. “Since when?”

Anakin shrugged. He didn’t like thinking about this, let alone talking about it. “Since the last time we were on Coruscant. He just said there were rumors about you and a female Senator, and about Padmé and a member of the Council. I made the connection myself.” Frustrated, he slammed his hand against the decking. “I can’t believe I was—that I let him manipulate me for all these years. I was so desperate for his approval—and he made me feel special. I was an _idiot_.”

Obi-Wan was watching him with concern. “Anakin, the Supreme Chancellor has played us all for fools for decades. I don’t doubt that he engineered the invasion of Naboo precisely to elevate himself to Chancellor Valorum's position fourteen years ago.” He sighed heavily. “And when Qui-Gon found you, and decided you were the Chosen One and brought you to Coruscant…of course he would want to corrupt you. You have more raw power than almost any other Jedi in the Order, and to those who believe in the prophecy, you’re the great Jedi hope. Turning your light to darkness would be the piece de resistance in his plan of revenge.”

“I never wanted any of this,” Anakin said again. “I just wanted the Council to trust me.” Even to his own ears, it sounded self-pitying.

“Another fear that Palpatine played on, I presume,” Obi-Wan said, but his voice was gentle. It was so like any of the countless times he’d soothed Anakin’s fears over the past fourteen years since their fates had been joined on Naboo that Anakin had to shut his eyes. He wanted that comfort—he wanted the knowledge of Obi-Wan’s love and affection, held close against him like armor, just like he wanted Padmé’s. But he clearly didn’t deserve them.

“Stop that,” Obi-Wan said sharply, and he actually rose up out of his chair to crouch across from him on the decking, reaching out to put his hand on the back of Anakin’s neck. “It’s not a question of _deserve_ , it’s—” Anakin tipped his head up and met his eyes, feeling Obi-Wan’s frustration at his own uncustomary inarticulateness, and couldn’t help but quirk a smile: the Negotiator was rarely at a loss for words. “You are a good man, and a remarkable Jedi, and my best friend,” Obi-Wan continued after a long, drawn-out moment. “We all have our failings—yes, even Padmé. If we got what we deserve, we’d all be dead or worse.”

“That’s very comforting, Master,” Anakin said primly, looking at him, and he was rewarded when Obi-Wan huffed out a laugh, tipping his forehead down to Anakin’s. Greatly daring, Anakin reached up to rest his organic hand on the nape of Obi-Wan’s neck, letting his fingertips curl in his too-long hair. Privately, he thought Obi-Wan looked better with shorter hair, but with a little more styling he could make this look work too. The war had been so intense lately that they both were badly in need of haircuts.

They stayed like that for a few minutes, openly taking comfort in each other’s presence as they hadn’t done since Anakin had been a child. He was gathering his courage to tell Obi-Wan something else when there was a whistle from the comms board: the _Vigilance_ was hailing them for their approach.

Obi-Wan hesitated for an instant, then pressed his lips lightly to Anakin’s forehead before he stood up to answer. Anakin stayed where he was, feeling the weight of everything they’d seen pressing down on him even as the clarity of the Force on Lothal drained away, his sense of the universe clouding over once again. It was like swimming with lead weights, or maybe just drowning. “Yes, Commander, General Skywalker and I are inbound,” Obi-Wan was saying to Cody, presumably, over the com. “Inform Admiral Yularen that General Skywalker will be staying with me on the _Vigilance_ for the next leg of the journey.—Acknowledged. We’ll be aboard soon.”

“You once told me that I would never be a major disappointment to you,” Anakin said into the silence after Obi-Wan clicked off the channel. “Is that still true?”

Seated at the shuttle’s controls, Obi-Wan’s shoulders tensed, but he didn’t answer.

The first thing Obi-Wan and Anakin did upon entering Obi-Wan’s spartan quarters on the _Vigilance_ was, without speaking, split up to search the compartment for listening devices. He would have found the idea unthinkable not too long ago, but if the Supreme Chancellor was the Sith Lord, then anything was possible.

“Anything?” Obi-Wan asked Anakin after finishing his half of the search, and his former apprentice shook his head.

“Negative. But that doesn’t mean—” He hesitated, then glanced meaningfully at the corners of the compartment.

“I concur,” Obi-Wan said. “Hold that thought.”

While Anakin, exhausted, sank onto Obi-Wan’s one chair, a meditation cushion scavenged from the Temple whose previous owner had died at First Geonosis, Obi-Wan crossed to the storage locker at the foot of his bunk. He removed a bottle of green liquor, two shot glasses, and a small cylindrical device, bringing all three back to the low table between Anakin’s cushion and the bunk, the only other furniture in the compartment. The rest of the space was given over to a holodisplay and matting for exercises.

Obi-Wan poured a shot into each of the glasses, then capped the bottle and depressed the button on top of the cylinder. A light on the side started blinking green, and he held one of the glasses out to his partner, keeping the other for himself.

“To the Republic,” Obi-Wan said, and they clinked glasses before downing the shots. He caught Anakin’s eyes watering a little; he couldn’t hold his liquor as well as Obi-Wan, whose life had at several points depended on his ability to make his way convincingly through the galactic underworld, drinking habits and all.

Anakin set his glass on the table and bowed his head for a second, closing his eyes. “So now we know why the Sith made the clones for us. A bio-inhibitor chip.” After a moment presumably spent contemplating that bleak reality, he opened his eyes again and sat up taller, leaning forward. “That’s what Fives was trying to tell us, what he was trying to tell Rex. He must have found out somehow, and he was killed for it. And the Kaminoans covered the whole thing up.”

“It makes sense,” Obi-Wan agreed. Fives had been one of Anakin’s men, and he’d taken the loss personally. It was part of what made him a good commander, but it was also one of the things that had been ripping him apart as the war dragged on.

The thought provoked a fresh wave of guilt: Obi-Wan had seen the signs, but he’d been too afraid of exposing his own secrets to reach out, too sublimely overconfident in how well he’d trained Anakin to believe that his former apprentice could be in any danger.

Which was idiotic, really, or at best, supremely overconfident. The war had turned one of his best friends to the dark side and back and driven the apprentice of another, a senior padawan who’d been in the Order longer than Anakin, to treason and murder. Pong Krell had turned on his own troops, and many other Jedi had died by suicide or been destroyed by the dark side. If it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone, even the Chosen One.

There were times when Obi-Wan was morbidly certain that it was happening to the entire Order, himself not least of all. He didn’t think Barriss Offee had been entirely wrong in her reasoning, or that Ahsoka had been wrong to find their lack of faith too much to bear. Even if she had allowed her fear and paranoia to drive her actions, and not shown sufficient faith in _them_.

Anakin had been watching him. “We have to tell the Council,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “If they don’t know about this Order 66, the Jedi in the field will be taken completely unawares. And they’ll all just—die.” They’d already seen for themselves how quickly Jedi could be dispatched if their clone troopers turned on them. It wasn’t hard to imagine it happening to all the other Jedi fighting the war across the galaxy, particularly if they were taken by surprise.

Obi-Wan couldn’t feel the alcohol yet, but he very much wanted to, so he poured himself another shot. “It’s diabolically clever,” he admitted, recapping the bottle. “If there are only two Sith, how could they kill all the thousands of Jedi?” He knocked the shot back, then set the glass on the table. “Answer: send the Jedi out to war and have the clones kill the Jedi for them, unawares.”

“Which would leave—” Anakin began, then stopped, shivering.

“Just the Jedi in the Temple,” Obi-Wan finished, feeling a knot of certainty lodge in the pit of his stomach. “And to kill them, send the new Sith apprentice with a legion.” At this point, aside from the councilors, the Temple mostly housed the younglings, the healers, and the older, recusant Jedi, none of whom were in any shape to fight. Nor could the Temple Guards stand against an army. It would be a slaughter, and it wouldn’t even be a difficult operation.

And as a trial of devotion for a new Sith, only recently turned from the Jedi, it was fiendishly perfect. The way to break someone, to make them yours, was to make them do that which was anathema to them. Temple records suggested that it had been the Sith way of destroying Jedi for millennia; there was no reason to think they’d stopped that now.

For the first time, Obi-Wan found himself wondering what Dooku had done—been made to do, perhaps. But all the evidence they had suggested that Dooku had gone willingly, and he realized that he already knew the answer: murdering his friend Sifo-Dyas in cold blood, and planting the seeds of the Jedi Order’s destruction in the clones.

Anakin let out a curse in Huttese and dropped his head into his hands. Obi-Wan had picked up enough of the language from him over the years to blink at the blistering oath: he didn’t need the Force to sense his misery, but it was thick in the room around them.

Sighing, he rose and stepped over the table, sitting down next to Anakin on the meditation cushion. It wasn’t designed to fit two humans, and Anakin had to move over to accommodate him; as Obi-Wan had intended, once he was settled on the cushion he immediately pressed closer again.

“We can destroy the Sith,” Obi-Wan told him, realizing as he spoke the words that he still believed them. He put his arms around Anakin, who slung his arms around him right back, turning his face into his neck. His shaggy hair tickled Obi-Wan’s skin over his collar.

Before today, the last time he’d done this without the excuse of war injuries had been—when? Years ago, before Kamino and First Geonosis. Before the war. Before Anakin had been Knighted, when he’d still been a child, before Obi-Wan had noticed, and forced himself to ignore, the fact that his own feelings had changed and deepened. He’d always loved Anakin, and he always would. But that love hadn’t always been as all-consuming as it was now. “Palpatine must realize that we’re stronger together, or he wouldn’t spend so much time trying to split us apart.”

Anakin shuddered hard in his arms, almost a muscle spasm, and turned his face into Obi-Wan’s chest, doing his best to burrow into his embrace even though he was half a head taller. Obi-Wan held him tightly, trying to project love and comfort and a surety he didn’t feel; Anakin’s distress was another presence in the compartment with them, so palpable it was almost physical. When he tentatively lifted a hand to his hair, Anakin let out a sound that was definitely and shockingly a sob; he was weeping unashamedly into Obi-Wan’s tunic.

How long they stayed that way, Obi-Wan didn’t care to ascertain. Eventually, Anakin’s shoulders stopped shaking and he pulled back, swiping his sleeve across his eyes and looking up at Obi-Wan, his expression shaky but open as he took a shuddering breath. “You’re right. And I—” He took another breath. “You’d still trust me?” he asked, staring at him. Obi-Wan felt the pressure of his scrutiny in the Force, and took a deep breath, very carefully letting go of the shields he normally maintained so assiduously. He felt Anakin’s presence in his mind, powerful but gentle, and saw his eyes widen. “In the name of the Force—you really would, wouldn’t you?”

“I would, and I do,” Obi-Wan said, squeezing him a little tighter to make the point. “Anakin, you are not Darth Vader.” The name sparked a wash of horror in the Force around them, but he kept talking. “Your destiny is still yours, not the Sith’s.”

“Is that really true?” Anakin asked, the turmoil within him roiling in the Force. He extricated himself from Obi-Wan’s grip, rising to turn and pace the compartment. “Obi-Wan, I—I have done things that aren’t what a Jedi should do.” He looked at his hands, clenching them into fists, then let the gesture go and squeezed his eyes shut. “On Tatooine, and—later.”

“The Sand People,” Obi-Wan said, watching him carefully, and Anakin nodded sharply.

“Yes,” he croaked, bringing his hands up to his face, tanned skin and black leather. “The ones who killed my mother, I—” He swallowed, and the next words came out in a whisper. “I killed them all.”

His distress reverberated through the Force, but it was old, like a scabbed-over wound, and Obi-Wan knew that the fact of it didn’t bother him so much as what it meant. Revenge was not the Jedi way.

“Does Padmé know?” he asked instead. Anakin nodded, his face still hidden under his hands.

Obi-Wan hesitated over his next words. Traditionally, Jedi did not discuss what they had seen in the Trials with anyone: the visions were thought to be too idiosyncratic, too personal. But observing such niceties had evidently cost them everything in one very near possible future. “You said you and Padmé married after First Geonosis,” he said carefully. “Was that while you were still a padawan?”

Anakin lowered his hands, meeting his eyes with a mixture of defiance and chagrin. “Yes. And the Sand People were—right before we went to rescue you.”

It had been one of the worst rescues in the history of the Jedi Order, all things considered, but now wasn’t the time to mention that, even in jest. “So you were married when you took the Trials,” he said slowly, hoping that Anakin could grasp the point he was making.

“I—yes.” Anakin stared at him. “So you’re saying—what? That it doesn’t matter?” Obi-Wan didn’t say anything. “How can it not matter?” Anakin demanded, his voice rising. “The Council—”

“‘The High Council is not the Jedi Order, and the Jedi Order is not the Jedi Code,’” Obi-Wan said, letting the memory of the old argument with Qui-Gon rise in a way that he normally didn’t. He quirked a smile at Anakin, but couldn’t sustain it for long. “Qui-Gon told me that once. What he meant was that the current prevailing interpretation of the Code is only a thousand years old; it dates back to the Ruusan Reformation, after the New Sith Wars. Qui-Gon felt that we were artificially limiting ourselves by adhering to it.”

Obi-Wan looked down at his hands, remembering Qui-Gon dying in his arms. _Promise me that you will train the boy_. He could feel Anakin watching him closely. “Which, to be certain, was not incorrect in and of itself: our interpretation of the Code was developed to guide Jedi behavior and practice, and thus prevent the sort of schism that had led to the Sith wars in the first place. But the Code is not the Force. The Jedi are not the Force; we are its servants, its agents, but not its masters. And I think that we have increasingly forgotten that.”

“Do you think Dooku was telling the truth?” Anakin asked abruptly. Under Obi-Wan’s questioning look, he elaborated, “When he said that Master Qui-Gon would have joined him, if he’d lived?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan admitted. “He was apparently telling the truth about the Sith Lord controlling the Senate, and even at the time…” He trailed off, remembering. Compared to some of the torture sessions he’d endured since, the one with Dooku on Geonosis had been little more than a love bite. Even the arena execution scheme had been charmingly quaint, if bloodthirsty.

For the first time, he couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if he’d accepted Dooku’s offer to join him in Qui-Gon’s place. The Sith Lord had apparently been in earnest when he’d made it.

“I think that Dooku may have sincerely believed what he was saying,” he said at last. “I’m not sure which of us knew Qui-Gon better; Dooku certainly knew him longer than I did. But of course his views were twisted by the dark side even before he resigned. And Qui-Gon wasn’t as radical as he liked to present himself, in some ways.” He sighed. “He certainly wouldn’t have approved of the war.”

Anakin snorted. “I’m not sure _I_ approve of the war anymore, Obi-Wan.”

“Indeed.” Obi-Wan looked at him: the Chosen One, the Jedi golden boy as the media portrayed him, the ridiculously young, battle-hardened Knight whose skin was brown from the sun of battles fought on dozens of worlds. If he could fall, no one was safe.

If he couldn’t be redeemed, no one was sure of their own salvation.

“The current interpretation of the Code was developed as a response to the last great war,” Obi-Wan said after a beat, “to stop it from ever happening again. But I have begun to wonder if it’s not useless, or even actively harmful, in fighting the current one.” If they’d had the strength and the will to see more of those visions of the future in the world between worlds, he might have wanted to find out how Anakin’s attachments had been used to destroy him. But deep down he suspected he already knew the answer: fear of loss was powerful, and not being able to admit one’s fears only gave them more power.

Quinlan had said it to him, on their way back from laying Ventress to rest in the graveyard of her people: the Code as they lived it now was structured by fear, hobbling the Jedi by abjuring them from attachments, full stop. But wasn’t it the case that a truly strong Jedi Knight could follow the path of the Jedi despite attachments? “It’d be the harder road,” Quinlan had said, “but Jedi aren’t supposed to be afraid of things being hard.”

Obi-Wan hadn’t been able to get his friend’s words out of his mind. “If,” he said slowly, meeting Anakin’s eyes, “you passed the Trials of Knighthood despite your attachments, that could be taken as proof that those attachments are of no consequence to the Force. That you incontrovertibly are a Jedi, despite everything.” He looked down at his hands, at the fine scars that four years of war had laid on them. They’d healed nearly invisibly, but Obi-Wan still knew they were there. “For that matter, so am I.”

Anakin took a breath, licked his lips. He looked young and scared. “Obi-Wan,” he said, “I can’t—I can’t think that. I can’t think that I’m special, somehow, or that—that I deserve to have everything. It’s that kind of selfish thinking that leads to Vader, I’m sure of it.” Obi-Wan couldn’t disagree; refusing to choose between his commitments, and thereby endangering both of them, was incontrovertibly selfish. But it wasn’t inherently evil, no matter what Yoda said.

_Do you believe he is the Chosen One?_ Mace Windu had asked him that of Anakin on Naboo, after he’d declared that he intended to honor his promise to Qui-Gon. Obi-Wan hadn’t thought at the time that he was determining the shape of his life forever after; he’d simply thought that Anakin Skywalker was alone in a huge galaxy and that he was one of the few beings who, in some small way, shared his grief for his friend and mentor, the master he’d loved like a father. He’d simply known that it was the only right thing to do.

He’d never been able to decide his answer to the question one way or the other, though he had made use of the idea at several junctures. On Mortis he’d denied it outright. “Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, “I’m certain you’re right that you must make a choice, and not simply try to have everything you want without making some kind of accounting for your responsibilities. But a choice is not necessarily a renunciation, or a rejection. There has been more than one kind of Jedi in the history of our Order; you may simply be of a different kind than we have recognized for the past thousand years. And the war has transformed us, in any case; even if we survive, we will no longer be the kind of Jedi we were before Geonosis.” That kind of Jedi, demonstrably, was all but extinct.

Anakin sighed. “I think I knew—I know that we are Jedi, Obi-Wan. But since the war began I—I can’t help but wonder what that means.”

“I know,” Obi-Wan said reluctantly. The Jedi weren’t meant to be weapons, or soldiers, but the war had reduced them to almost nothing else. And in that cause—the cause the Sith had devised for them—they had murdered, betrayed, lied and foresworn themselves.

What was the great legacy of this Order that they were protecting? Barriss Offee had called the Jedi warmongers, and as much as he abhorred her methods he was no longer certain that she’d been wrong. Whatever they had been, they had thrown it all away in the name of the Republic—a Republic that was itself already a sham, that no longer truly existed. And if it was so easily discarded, perhaps it hadn’t been so worth preserving after all.

That was arrogance talking, of course; he could practically hear Yoda’s lecture. But they’d named him to the Council, and while he was well aware that he didn’t have all the answers, he did think that he was probably asking some of the right questions.

And that at least one of the answers, however tangled, was standing right in front of him. “I know,” Obi-Wan repeated. “But you’re here, Anakin, and a Jedi Knight. You are already part of that meaning, just like the rest of us. We only have to work it out.”

As much as Obi-Wan didn’t enjoy walking through the fire of discussing the imminent possible death of the Republic and destruction of the Jedi with Anakin, they did actually still have duties in the present: a scheduled command staff meeting of their two fleets, reviewing the status of their repairs.

Those repairs’ status was more or less as expected; they were still projecting that all the ships in their flotilla would be able to undertake the hyperspace voyage back to Coruscant in just under twenty-two standard hours. The Lothal shipyards were remarkably good for such an out of the way planet, but Obi-Wan was no longer surprised by that particular coincidence. The Force had brought them here.

Rex and Appo spent the meeting eyeing Anakin with surreptitious concern, clearly wondering when he was going to transfer back to the _Resolute_ , but they were good soldiers: they didn’t ask. For his part, Anakin held it together reasonably well; he didn’t look like he’d seen a ruinous vision of the future scant hours before, though he didn’t look precisely normal either. Predictably, as the meeting was breaking up Admiral Yularen did ask about Anakin’s plans. Most of Obi-Wan’s attention was on his discussion with Admiral Block about the repairs to _Vigilance_ ’s escorts, but he did catch Anakin waving off Yularen’s concern before he left the bridge separately.

For his part, Obi-Wan had developed an impressive tension headache, but at least he still knew one reliable way of working out his frustrations. He headed to the shipboard gym and spent an hour going through the obstacle course, leaving him agreeably sweaty and tired at the end. Normally he would have asked some of the troopers to scrimmage with him, but at the moment asking the clones to open fire on him, even in training, seemed too unwise.

Damn Sidious anyway.

Returning to his cabin, Obi-Wan found the lights dimmed to half; Anakin was curled up in the single bunk, apparently fast asleep. He’d developed the habit of sleeping shirtless since the start of the war, for reasons that Obi-Wan hadn’t wanted to admit he’d known, and the fall of the sheets revealed both his impressive musculature and the many scars that marked his body. All of them looked old, but that was Jedi healing; the most recent were from just a few weeks ago.

Swallowing, Obi-Wan started the process of removing his boots and vambraces, leaving all of them on top of one of the storage lockers. He’d lost his gloves a few deployments back, and hadn’t felt the need for them again. Next he stripped out of his outer layers, then headed to the ‘fresher to shower and change for sleep, avoiding Anakin’s gear piled unceremoniously on the floor. He and Anakin had shared rooms and beds before, many times; this wasn’t really any different, though it was a much smaller bed than usual. The compartment did have a fold-down jump bunk on the other wall, but apparently Anakin hadn’t wanted to use it.

When he came out, toweling his damp hair absently, he sat down on the bunk next to Anakin, looking down at his partner. In the Force, his sleeping mind was troubled; the usual wartime nightmares they both had were apparently being pre-empted by visions of a very dark possible future.

_You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you_.

Obi-Wan gave into the impulse to melodrama and sighed. Perhaps Anakin hadn’t figured it out, or couldn’t let himself realize the truth, but he knew himself well enough to know that he’d left that— _Vader_ —with one last lie when he’d walked away from their duel. He could repudiate Vader, and obviously had, but Anakin, never.

He hoped that his future self hadn’t known, or suspected, the lengths Sidious would go to save his new apprentice. He liked to think that he would have had the strength, or the mercy, to spare him the suffering—to say nothing of what must have awaited the rest of the galaxy at Vader’s hands.

He gestured the towel over to its hook on the wall, then reached out to smooth Anakin’s over-long hair out of his eyes. His presence in the Force was the same as ever: a permanent nova, shot through with shadows that only made the light more brilliant. Of course the Sith Lord would want to turn him, even if he weren’t the Chosen One: if he could be turned, he would become a powerful ally. It was the same reason that Dooku had tried to turn _him_ ; the Sith were always looking to supplant each other.

Anakin had gotten somewhat better at sharing a bed since the war started, for which Obi-Wan silently thanked Padmé: evidently she’d broken him of his previous tendency to hog the blankets. But the single bunk was so narrow that there was very little space to go around, and Obi-Wan was forced to chivvy Anakin into the beginnings of wakefulness so that they could curl up together on their sides, fitting their knees together like puzzle pieces.

Even in the dim light, he could see the lines carved into Anakin’s young face, lines that didn’t smooth with sleep. _I won’t let the Sith have you_ , Obi-Wan thought, looking at him across the pillow. _I may have failed in that future, but not in this present._ Before he could think better of it, he leaned forward and brushed a very light kiss across Anakin’s lips. His partner’s sleeping mind didn’t change, but some small amount of the tension in his presence slackened in the Force.

Obi-Wan loved him more than he would ever have admitted, more than a good Jedi should or could. Despite what Anakin thought and what the newsies wrote, he knew he was far from being a good Jedi; what he was was effective, and capable. And, in all honesty, dangerous. He’d proven that over and over again in the war, and had been rewarded for it with more and more high-stakes, compromising assignments.

He hadn’t minded, precisely. Anakin had once asked him if he even knew when the Council was using him, and Obi-Wan wasn’t stupid: of course he knew. He’d dedicated his life to the Order and the Jedi in return for the Force, and thought the trade fair. But that was before he’d seen the apparent end of the path they were currently walking, which led to Anakin falling to the Sith, the Republic destroyed, and the Jedi exterminated. Given the choice, Obi-Wan would have put saving Anakin ahead of his loyalty to the Order at almost any time since they’d met, especially over the last year or so; the fact that Anakin’s fate was apparently linked to the very survival of the Jedi just made it even more clearly the right thing to do.

And if the price of saving the Jedi was being expelled from the Jedi Order, well, he could live with that. Before First Geonosis, he would have said that that meant he would no longer be a Jedi; now he wasn’t so sure. Ahsoka had turned away from the Order, but she’d still been a padawan when she’d left, for all that he thought she’d have been Knighted within a year or two if she’d stayed. Moreover, if she returned, he had a shrewd sense that she would most likely be readmitted; the Council had acknowledged that they had made a grave mistake. Obi-Wan was a Master on that same High Council; they could take the latter away from him, but the former was a seal on his soul from the Force itself. He himself could dissolve it—a Sith like Dooku was proof of that—but no other Jedi could in and of themselves.

Even now he would bet that some of his fellow councilors would consider such thoughts heresy. But Obi-Wan was used to being underestimated by his fellow Jedi, and was no stranger to being vindicated by events too. He didn’t believe in luck; he believed in preparation. And in this he was very prepared to do whatever he had to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The conversation with Yoda that Obi-Wan alludes to is depicted in _Obi-Wan and Anakin_ , by Charles Soule with art by Marco Checcetto (2016).
> 
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	4. Heretics, Recusants, and the High Council

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The wise benefit from a second opinion.

_Vigilance_ , _Resolute,_ and their joint battle group dropped out of hyperspace on the approach to Coruscant two days later. Returning to the capital planet had never filled Obi-Wan with so much reluctance and foreboding, and from their bond he felt Anakin’s similar welter of emotions as they stood together on the bridge of the _Vigilance_ and watched the capital planet grow larger in the forward viewport. There was nothing to say at this juncture; the Council would either believe them, or they wouldn’t.

Coruscant loomed large in the Force, its trillion souls a gravity well of thoughts, feelings, emotions. Obi-Wan had grown up knowing how to tune it out; more apparent was Cody’s concerned gaze on him from his position a few meters away. He liked Cody, and normally he would have made it a point to drift over and try to reassure the commander about his mental state, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it this time. Rex had commed Anakin just after they’d dropped out of hyperspace, rather obviously worried about his general for what Obi-Wan imagined must be similar reasons. He was well aware that the clone rumor mill must be on fire about him and Anakin after this week, but acknowledging those rumors, let alone trying to correct them, would only inflame them. Like so many other things about the war, it could only be endured.

 _Resolute_ and her escorts remained in high orbit; _Vigilance_ continued down to the Temple staging yard, and once the warship made planetfall Obi-Wan and Anakin headed to the docking tunnel connecting her to the shipyard. Their baggage, they left aboard; they deployed often enough that they each now kept a spare set of gear in their rooms at the Temple, which they saw only rarely.

Thinking back, Obi-Wan tried to recall how long it had been since they’d been on Coruscant: six months? Seven? Since Yoda’s strange expedition with Artoo, not long after Ahsoka’s departure. At the time, he’d been grateful to get away from the reminders of her absence, but now he just missed her, for both their sakes. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d appreciated her steady presence in dealing with Anakin until she was gone.

Plo Koon was waiting for them next to a Jedi shuttlebus on the other side of the docking slip, and Obi-Wan felt his heart sink. A welcome party invariably meant serious business, and from the way Anakin glanced at him, tensing, he knew that he felt it too.

“Master Plo,” Obi-Wan said when they reached him, reaching out to grip his colleague’s arms in unfeigned pleasure. “It’s good to see you.”

“And you, Obi-Wan, Skywalker,” Plo Koon said in his deep, synthesized voice, looking between them as he returned Obi-Wan’s grip. He and Obi-Wan were old allies on the Council, of a similar temperament and outlook, and he and Anakin shared an interest in Ahsoka, though Obi-Wan still wasn’t sure whether Anakin realized that Plo had been intending to take her as his own padawan before Yoda had intervened. “I was worried when I heard that you two had gone to Lothal.”

“Our reputation precedes us,” Anakin said, taking a seat on one of the benches once they had boarded the ‘bus.

“Lothal’s reputation precedes you,” Plo corrected. “And your cryptic communications didn’t help.” Although his synthesized voice didn’t change much, his relief at seeing them alive was clear in the Force. These days when Jedi were sent out on missions no one took it for granted that they would come back.

Obi-Wan sat down on the bench opposite Anakin, resisting the temptation to put his head in his hands. “If it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have believed it myself,” he admitted.

“Hmm.” Plo Koon turned from laying in the shuttlebus’s slow but steady path to the Temple to regard them both, crossing his arms. “Anything you want to give me an advance warning about?”

Anakin shot a glance at Obi-Wan, who shook his head. He’d considered that very question, but ultimately decided it might create more problems than it solved. “The news is bad. But it’s probably best to tell it all at once.” Outside the windows, the cityscape began to pass as the shuttlebus rose into the nearest skylane. They were only a few klicks from the Jedi Temple, and the Processional Way was already visible in the near distance. Looking at it, Obi-Wan blinked: all at once he saw the Temple burning in the noonday sun.

He blinked again, and the vision was gone.

He turned his head, and saw Anakin looking at him from his seat across the cabin, slumped on the bench with his arms crossed over his chest. “There is still hope,” Obi-Wan said to Plo. “We think we know what we have to do to win the war once and for all. But it won’t be easy.”

The vocoder/atmosphere filter that Plo wore made it impossible to tell when he was smiling visually, but Obi-Wan felt the expression through the Force: a brief, intense flash of eagerness and ferocity breaking through his fellow Jedi Master’s war-weariness and general despondency. “We are Jedi,” he said. “It isn’t supposed to be easy.”

The report about the battle at Mon Cala and its aftermath was straightforward, as was the part about their decision to undertake repairs at the Lothal shipyard. But when Anakin took up the thread of the story about the disturbance he’d sensed in the Force, and their decision to go downplanet to investigate it, Obi-Wan could sense his fellow Councilors growing skeptical and wary by turns. He didn’t blame them, precisely; Yoda’s story about hearing Qui-Gon’s voice hadn’t been any more credible, and the Grand Master still refused to talk about his actual experiences after Anakin had helped him break out of the Halls of Healing.

It took a while to tell the full story with the Masters interrupting to ask about points of clarification periodically, though most of them restrained their expressions of skepticism until the end, when Obi-Wan related a severely truncated version of the conversations he and Anakin had had after their return from Lothal’s surface. He had been permitted to give his portion of their report from his actual seat, while Anakin had been directed to stand near Oppo Rancisis’ empty chair, his hands clasped in front of him. Things had been so chaotic that they hadn’t even had a chance to draw up a shortlist of possible candidates for Rancisis’ seat: Obi-Wan expected it to stay empty for a while, or until it didn’t matter anymore.

There was silence in the Council chamber by the time he finished. Outside, the sun was declining on its path, inexorably putting the Senate buildings and the rest of Coruscant in shadow. Obi-Wan had a strange rush of memory, his sight overlaid with the vision he’d dismissed on Mortis, mixed with his clear recollection of standing in this room with Qui-Gon and Anakin on the afternoon of their return from Naboo and Tatooine. It was too much, and he had to shut his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, the weight of attention in the chamber on him, Anakin, and Yoda had not abated.

Eventually, Ki-Adi-Mundi spoke.“These are grave tidings indeed, Obi-Wan, Skywalker. And grave accusations to make, not only of yourselves, but of the Supreme Chancellor.” Like Shaak Ti, Stass Allie, and Kit Fisto, he was present by hologram, the image flickering slightly as it traveled through the HoloNet relays. They had reasoned that Sidious most likely couldn’t directly eavesdrop on the Council’s communications. It was a risk they had to take; there was no way to call all the councilors back to Coruscant without attracting attention they couldn’t afford.

“If the Lothal temple had such capabilities, the Jedi of old would never have abandoned it,” Saesee Tiin said. “It would be madness to leave such a place unguarded.”

“It would be madness to believe this story,” Stass Allie said quietly. “Visions are one thing, and certainly worth heeding. But a world between worlds like you describe? Does the power of the Force truly extend so far?”

At that, Anakin stirred. “I was told when I came to the Order that the power to destroy a planet was insignificant next to the power of the Force, Master Allie. I have seen nothing since to doubt it.”

There was a slight pause as everyone waited to hear whether Yoda would say anything, and a slight sigh as the Council released the breath it had collectively been holding when he didn’t. “The Jedi of old did not think the way we do,” Mace Windu said instead. “As is clear when we consider our prevailing interpretation of the Jedi Code.” There was another subtle shift in the room as everyone’s attention turned to Yoda, then centered back on Windu. Technically it was the Grand Master who was the head of the Council, but Mace had increasingly been acting in Yoda’s stead, with Obi-Wan taking over more and more of his duties as Master of the Order.

That was a leading statement if ever there was one, but no one in the chamber seemed particularly eager to follow where it led. It was an open, uncomfortable secret that cracks had appeared between Yoda and Windu over the past several months, since Yoda had come back from his ghost-hunting expedition and promptly started withdrawing from the rest of the Order. Just as it was an open secret that the war was winnowing the Jedi down in numbers even as they were being honed into a very different shape than the Order that had started the war.

“Why are we even discussing this?” Coleman Kcaj asked. “Are we to take the word of a confessed Sith? Skywalker admits that he has broken the Code and that in the future he slaughtered Jedi by the thousands. What kind of Order are we if we not only shelter him, but sanction his actions by heeding this—this farrago of lies?”

In the Force, Obi-Wan felt Anakin flinch, his tension ratcheting higher, but he held onto his self-control: his jaw clenched, but he didn’t say anything. “There is no proof that the Supreme Chancellor is Force-sensitive, let alone the Sith lord we have sought,” Agen Kolar put in. “If we arrest Palpatine, it will fatally destabilize the Republic and we will be moving exactly as this Sith plot requires us.”

“May I remind you all that this Order has done terrible things of its own volition,” Plo Koon said. His tone was placid, revealing none of the extent to which he and Obi-Wan had fought the things he referred to now. He’d delayed his deployment for today’s session; he could delay at most another twenty-four hours before people would start asking questions the Order couldn’t easily answer. “It was we ourselves who sanctioned the plot to assassinate Dooku. It was we ourselves who accepted Quinlan Vos back into our Order after he fell to the dark side, and we who sanctioned his breaking the Code by giving his lover Ventress—may I remind this Council, herself a former Sith acolyte and a Jedi padawan before that—a funeral with honors. How is that different from what Anakin Skywalker might have done? _Might have done_ , Councilors. Here and now, he has not yet committed the greatest sins he admits to.”

“We are Jedi, not frightened children,” Kit Fisto said. “We cannot condemn someone for the actions they may one day take. The future is always in motion.”

Anakin took a breath, but it didn’t do anything for the tension in his frame. “I will not let that future happen, Masters. I will die rather than turn to the dark side. But it was not me—not Darth Vader alone who brought down the Jedi in the visions we saw.”

Obi-Wan leaned forward in his chair. “If the Jedi Order is to survive, we must take action now.”

“If the Jedi Order turns from its principles to survive, are we even worth saving?” Stass Allie asked, her hologram flickering slightly.

“We have already done so,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said quietly, and there was another slight ripple in the room as the Councilors shifted in their seats minutely. They had all had the thought, but no one had ever spoken it aloud in this chamber before. “Now we must decide what to do despite that fact. Or because of it.”

“It seems that we have been given a chance to save ourselves, by the grace of the Force,” Shaak Ti said. Her hologram wavered every so often, lines flickering through it, presumably from storm interference. “So perhaps we are not beyond redemption after all.”

Of them all, Shaak Ti was arguably in the most vulnerable position, surrounded as she was by Kaminoans and clones, but her voice was steady and her expression tranquil. “The philosophy of the Order can wait until we have survived this crisis,” she continued. “We must begin warning the Jedi in the field about this danger.”

“And the clones,” Obi-Wan said. “They have the right to know the truth. Armed with it, they may even choose to resist Palpatine’s order, should he give it in this universe.”

“The clones are clones,” Agen Kolar said. Obi-Wan didn’t know him well; he had joined the Council only recently, after Eeth Koth’s death. He had no qualms about his fellow Master’s skill, but he did take issue with some of his philosophical positions. “They were created—by the Sith, as we now know. They will follow their Orders, whether those orders are given by the Jedi or by this Darth Sidious.”

“The clones are people.” Obi-Wan spoke calmly, though he was beginning to get a headache from the strain of bearing up under his colleagues’ emotions. Normally they were supposed to keep their feelings under tight control in session, but the strain of the war had steadily worn away at them all, and this topic was emotional to say the least. “They are living beings just as all the rest of us, luminous in the Force. If we give them the chance to prove themselves worthy of our trust, they will not betray us. Captain Rex did not, in the visions we saw.”

“At the least, it seems prudent to warn the Knights in the field,” Kit Fisto agreed. “The generals can choose whether to inform their commanders.”

It was a terrible compromise, and Obi-Wan knew with the certainty of his wild precognitive talent that Jedi and clones would die because of it. The only problem was that he was equally sure that Jedi and clones were going to die anyway.

“But how shall we accomplish this?” Saesee Tiin asked. “We cannot trust any military communications, and we cannot spare anyone currently associated with the war effort. If all of the councilors onplanet go, that will raise equal amounts of suspicion.”

Ki-Adi-Mundi nodded slowly. “I see no other option but to ask some of the senior Jedi remaining on Coruscant to go.” He referred to the cadre of older Jedi who had refused to participate in the war, of which there were fewer than there had been four years ago. Several had been murdered in the Coruscant underworld; several more had killed themselves. Some had just died of despair. “They may be open to accepting an errand of mercy.”

“I concur,” Mace Windu said immediately. “We cannot trust padawans or younglings with this information.”

“And we don’t have enough of them left anyway,” Plo Koon said bluntly. “All of them are either deployed or too young.” Or in prison for murder, but then, Barriss Offee had been dismissed from the Order before her trial.

Stass Allie nodded. “On what pretext can we send them?” she asked.

“Call it an inspection tour,” Ki-Adi-Mundi suggested. “If we send truly aged Jedi, like Master Sinube, we can pass it off as a whim of the elderly.”

No one looked at Yoda, but the attention of the councilors briefly turned to him anyway. He had spoken no words at all thus far.

Windu and Obi-Wan looked at each other. “Very well,” Mace said after a beat. “If there are no objections, we will delegate Master Tiin and myself to speak to Master Sinube and one or two other masters this afternoon. In the meantime, we will ask Madam Nu and some of her padawans in astrography to plot least-time courses between the positions of every Jedi in the field. If they split up and take one segment of the list, they each have an equal chance of contacting everyone before it is too late.”

That it might already be too late hung in the air between them, too clear in the Force to be worthy of remark. Obi-Wan had slept with his lightsaber under his pillow every night the past few months, when he’d been able to sleep at all. Since their return from Lothal, whenever his thoughts wandered, he could see a hooded figure leading a battalion of clone troopers up the steps of the Temple in his mind’s eye. He knew it was a warning vision from the Force; he’d seen its aftermath in the world between worlds.

“There is no proof of these claims,” Agen Kolar said again. “Moving against the Chancellor without proof will destroy the very Republic that we have sacrificed everything to save.”

“What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists, and the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?” Obi-Wan asked. “Palpatine being the Sith lord explains much of his actions over the past dozen years and more. It also explains how our intelligence has continuously betrayed us over the course of the war.”

There was a ripple of agreement in the Force around them: the Council had been operating under the assumption that there was a highly-placed traitor in the Senate, and had limited its interactions with members of that body accordingly—in hindsight, a convenient way to engender mistrust between the two institutions. But the traitor being all the way at the top fit the evidence too.

“I concur with Master Kolar; we cannot put any more credence in Jedi Skywalker’s story,” Saesee Tiin said, putting just a hint of stress on Anakin’s rank. Obi-Wan suppressed his immediate reaction, which was to glare at Tiin; Anakin’s frown deepened, skirting perilously close to a scowl, but he didn’t say anything. “The claim about the clones and these chips matches what we have discovered about Master Sifo-Dyas and the creation of the clone army. But the rest of it? There is no evidence that it is anything more than the lurid vision of a over-stressed mind.” Obi-Wan felt Anakin’s spike of annoyance, but Kit Fisto spoke up before either of them could reply.

“That is not correct, Saesee,” the Nautolan said, smooth as always. “Records in the Jedi Archives speak of the Lothal temple as a nexus in time. Furthermore, Count Dooku told Master Kenobi that there was a Sith lord in the Senate before First Geonosis. We merely assumed that he was lying, as is the way of the Sith.”

Lies might be the way of the dark side, but they weren’t exactly alien to the Jedi, either, as Obi-Wan’s repeated exploits in the war had proved only too well. For that matter, Dooku had been a Jedi Master once, and not just any Jedi: Yoda’s last student.

“Doubt the Force, do you, Master Tiin?” Yoda asked suddenly, and the councilors stirred, every eye in the room shifting to the Grand Master. His voice was as acid as Obi-Wan had ever heard it. “Claim to comprehend its entirety, do you?”

Saesee Tiin looked back at Yoda without blinking, which was more than many Masters older than he could have boasted. “I do not, Master Yoda,” he said. “But such stories have no place outside Jedi fairy tales.” Obi-Wan winced, and most of the other councilors looked back to Yoda, whose story about hearing voices and Force ghosts they had so roundly dismissed—and who had enlisted Anakin’s assistance to defy them.

“This isn’t the first time in this war that we have seen things out of Jedi fairy tales,” Shaak Ti said calmly. “The kyber crystal on Utapau, for example.” Across the room, Anakin stirred, and Obi-Wan caught the drift of his thoughts in the Force: he was remembering Mortis.

He had wanted to never think about the nightmarish events on Mortis again, and he’d resisted all attempts by Anakin and Ahsoka to discuss what had happened there once they’d made their report to the Council. Ahsoka had died and been resurrected by the Daughter, Anakin had been confirmed as the Chosen One by the Father—and had thrown in with the Son and the dark side of the Force. He’d told himself that his failures he’d seen there, in visions and in reality, had only been expressions of his fears, doubts that were unworthy of Anakin. But he’d been lying to himself, as he had about so many other things.

“Or the stories about the Chosen One,” Coleman Kcaj said, and Obi-Wan reminded himself to focus on the here and now. The sense of Kcaj’s satisfaction hung in the Force around him; clearly he thought he’d struck a great rhetorical blow. “Who is to say which legends hold a grain of truth, and which are merely nonsense?”

“We thought the Sith were mere nonsense until the Battle of Naboo nearly fourteen years ago,” Plo Koon reminded him. “We were proven wrong.”

“And conveniently, Qui-Gon Jinn and Master Kenobi leveraged Jinn’s death and vindication to blackmail the Council into permitting Anakin Skywalker to be trained, despite his age,” Kcaj said. “A self-fulfilling prophecy, wouldn’t you say?”

Obi-Wan couldn’t tell where his wash of anger ended and Anakin’s began, but fortunately, Ki-Adi-Mundi beat them both to it. “The decision of this Council fourteen years ago is not open to debate, Master Kcaj,” he said, reproof clear in his voice. Obi-Wan concentrated on his breathing, trying to reassert his grip on his emotions, knowing from Shaak Ti’s glance at him that his fellow Councilors had sensed his lapse. Across the room, Anakin’s scowl deepened further, his mood darkening along with his expression. “Anakin Skywalker was admitted to this Order with the approval of a majority of the councilors at the time, and he passed the Trials of Knighthood three and a half years ago. He is as much a Jedi as any of us.” Obi-Wan felt a wash of surprise and pleasure from Anakin through their bond: evidently it was more than he’d been expecting to hear.

“In any case, this is the Jedi High Council.” Shaak Ti sounded almost sad. “The living rule here, not the dead.”

“The Jedi Order will be comprised of no one but the dead if we do not heed Skywalker’s warnings,” Plo said. “Does it matter whether the events he describes are artifacts of the future or warning visions? Masters, I must ask you: is the survival of the Jedi something we are willing to wager?”

Coleman Kcaj turned to look at Obi-Wan, who stared right back as Kcaj spoke to the room in general. “The Code exists for a reason, Master Koon. Better we die as Jedi than live as apostates.”

Obi-Wan said nothing, but he held Kcaj’s gaze until the other councilor looked away and Ki-Adi-Mundi leaned forward. “I do not believe that even the Jedi High Council has the right to consign the rest of the Order, from infants to the most aged and infirm, to certain death or worse,” he said. “Even when we committed members of this Order to serve in the Republic’s war effort, we did not make that service compulsory for any of them.”

“Without the Jedi Order there will be no peace in the galaxy or balance in the Force,” Obi-Wan said, because he knew it to be true, though it felt like a twisted thing to profess at the moment. Yoda and the rest of the Council hadn’t meant to start a war when they’d ordered the Jedi strike force to Geonosis nearly four years ago, but the war had begun there anyway.

Kit Fisto nodded. “It would be selfish to put our own self-image ahead of the welfare of the rest of the galaxy. And choosing death for the sake of our code would be the height of selfishness.”

“Played the Sith Lord’s game, we have,” Yoda said. “Change the rules, we must now. No other path to do this, do I see.”

This was the exact same argument that had led them to sanction the assassination of Dooku, the decision to lie to the Order, the Senate, and the Chancellor, and many other choices that had pushed them ever closer to the abyss. Obi-Wan felt a pang of disappointment that it seemed to be working again, though from the feeling in the chamber, it was clear that none of the councilors were entirely satisfied with the turns the discussion had taken. He could acknowledge that some of his disappointment was self-interest; without a great deal more dissent among the Council, it seemed probable that he and Anakin would be out of the Order when the war was over.

He’d known that Anakin thought about leaving the Order quite frequently; now he even had a better idea of why. He’d once been prepared to be a Jedi outside the Order, whatever that meant, for Anakin’s sake; he could be prepared again.

At the moment the thought of leaving the war behind, however irresponsible, was nonetheless extremely tempting. Though if anyone tried to make Anakin face the same kind of military trial that Ahsoka had—there was an argument to be made that his liaison with Padmé constituted dereliction of duty on his part—he’d be finding out what it would be like to be a galactic fugitive for real. At Ahsoka’s trial, he had listened to Palpatine nearly pronounce her death sentence and known that he wouldn’t stand to see it carried out, one way or another. The same went double for Anakin.

“Masters, everything has proceeded so far according to his design,” Anakin put in. Belatedly, Obi-Wan wondered if the military trial possibility had occurred to him too: no Jedi had been subjected to such treatment until Ahsoka, and Barriss Offee remained the only other former Jedi who had. At the start of the war it would have been unthinkable. “The Order has been playing Sidious’s game. If the Jedi and the Republic are to survive, we must act in ways that he would not foresee.”

“From what you say, Skywalker, there is no setback that he cannot turn to his advantage, no move he makes that does not play on multiple levels at once,” Shaak Ti said. “How are we to tear a hole in a thousand-year plot, here at the wrong end of a millennium of hatred?”

“I don’t know, Master Ti,” Anakin said, some of the frustration Obi-Wan sensed from him audible in his voice. “We only know what we saw, and what we suspect. But it has to be possible to do something he won’t anticipate.”

“At the least, we can do nothing openly until we have had time to warn all or most of the Jedi in the field about the clones and the chips,” Plo Koon said. “Any hint that we suspect anything before then, and we are all lost.”

Anakin, doubtless sensing the direction of his thoughts, caught his eye from across the room; Obi-Wan gave him the barest shake of his head. There would be time to decide their future later, if they had one. Even if they were thrown out, they would still be together.

The silence stretched, but no one broke it. “Very well,” Mace Windu said, synthesizing the extremely rough consensus that they could all sense. “This Council will hold the question of Anakin Skywalker’s actions with respect to the Code in abeyance for the duration of the war. We will revisit that matter once the Sith have been destroyed and the future of the Order, and of the Republic, is secured.”

Yoda was glowering, while Kcaj and Tiin were radiating disapproval in the Force and Kolar looked openly mutinous: Obi-Wan had an unbecoming flash of wishing Even Piell weren’t dead. That was four of eleven; Plo Koon, Ki-Adi-Mundi, and Shaak Ti seemed to be in better accord with Windu’s declaration. Stass Allie looked upset, and what Mace and Kit Fisto were thinking, he couldn’t venture to guess, but like everyone else he’d felt the Force resonate with Mace’s words, even thickly clouded by the dark side as it had been for so long. The memory of its clarity on Lothal already seemed like a sweet dream made nightmarish in comparison with reality—though Obi-Wan did wonder whether it was a little better than it had been before their trip to the world between worlds. Perhaps that was just the benefit of foresight.

Four to four, with three in the middle. The one good thing was that if they didn’t revisit the question until after the war was over, Anakin facing a military trial upon his expulsion was much less likely.

Of course it wouldn’t matter if they all died, and if there was one thing the last few years had proven, it was that even members of the Council weren’t invulnerable: it was entirely likely that some of Obi-Wan’s colleagues would not live to see the end of the war. For that matter, the same probably went double for him, since he would go wherever Anakin went, which in this case was to take the battle to the Sith. But he was a Jedi, and he’d accepted the inevitability of his own death long ago.

It was the deaths of others that had always given him trouble.

As the meeting was breaking up, Plo Koon crossed the Council chamber to where Obi-Wan was sitting in his chair, staring down at his clasped hands in an attempt to gather his thoughts. “Obi-Wan,” Plo said, reaching out to touch his shoulder lightly, and Obi-Wan looked up. He sensed nothing but concern from his friend and ally, which was a relief. “Walk with me.”

Anakin had made himself scarce as soon as he’d been dismissed; he was almost certainly calling Padmé, as they’d discussed. Obi-Wan and Plo made their way to the turbolift in silence; when it opened on the plaza level, Plo led the way through the grand corridors to the courtyard of the Great Tree. A late afternoon breeze whispered softly through its leaves as Plo turned beneath its branches to face him, his arms crossed over his chest.

“Would you really leave the Order for Skywalker?” he asked without preamble. The question was blunt, but his tone was non-judgmental.

Obi-Wan blinked. He hadn’t said anywhere near as much, of course, but this was Jedi intuition at its finest. “I was prepared to, years ago before the war,” he said after a moment, resisting the urge to temporize. He did mirror Plo’s gesture, clasping his elbows inside his cloak. This one was brand new, having been requisitioned after the battle at Mon Cala, and it didn’t quite feel as comfortable as the previous five had. “You were on the Council then; didn’t Yoda mention it?”

“Believe it or not, Obi-Wan, you and Skywalker were not a constant topic of discussion,” Plo told him, though Obi-Wan heard the amusement in his voice. In the Force, he only sensed concern and compassion from his friend, which was heartening. “And to be frank, the rest of the Council got tired of hearing Yoda’s ruminations about you two.” He paused. “You were prepared to leave, and—what?”

“At the time, Anakin was still a child,” Obi-Wan said, keeping his voice level. “I told Yoda that I was prepared to complete his training as a Jedi outside the Order if it came to it; I admit I did not put much more thought into it than that.” He hadn’t had to; it had been an inborn conviction, a truth that had been obvious as soon as he’d realized it.

Plo eyed him. “Conveniently ignoring that for the past thousand years the Order has been the home of all Jedi, and that we have not tended to look kindly on those claiming otherwise. Partly out of the belief that those who have tried to be Jedi outside the Order have displayed a disturbing tendency to fall to the dark side of the Force.”

“That isn’t quite true,” Obi-Wan countered. “There have been splinter groups, like the Ach-to sect, even during this millennium. Their members were no more likely to fall to the dark side than any other Jedi. And in any case, it never happened.” He glanced up at the leaves of the tree, reaching up to touch one gently. After the silence of the Temple at the pole on Lothal, even the distant background hum of the eternal Coruscant traffic in this courtyard seemed loud.

The Kel Dor Master stared at him for a long moment. “You know I voted against expelling Ahsoka from the Order,” he said eventually. Obi-Wan waited, trusting that the non sequitur would be explained. “We were too quick to allow her to be branded a traitor, and too slow to pursue other avenues of the investigation. The news about Sifo-Dyas and Dooku has only confirmed my conviction that our sight has been clouded by the dark side. We see traitors where there are none, and fail to notice the real betrayers in our midst.” He paused. “I know the belief that leaving the Order means risking the dark side is common amongst our fellow Jedi, but I do not think remaining is any less dangerous now.”

Obi-Wan let go of the leaf and turned back to his fellow Councilor. “You know the Chancellor was about to announce a death sentence in Ahsoka’s case,” he said quietly. Palpatine’s intention in the Force had been uncommonly clear, and the flash of malicious glee that Obi-Wan had caught from him in the courtroom made sense now that they knew he was in fact the Sith Lord. Ahsoka’s execution would probably have alienated Anakin from the Order permanently. When Plo nodded reluctantly, he continued, “I had no intention of allowing that sentence to be carried out.”

There was a short, fraught silence. Obi-Wan had never told anyone this before, and in his considered opinion it was by far the most scandalous deed he’d contemplated in his career as a Jedi. To date, anyway. “That would have make you a traitor to the Republic in truth,” Plo said, sounding somewhere between irritated and disbelieving. “It would have confirmed the worst whispers about the Order—to say nothing of putting Skywalker in an impossible position.”

Not unlike the impossible position they’d put him in when they’d kept him on the outside of the Rako Hardeen deception. “I feel confident Anakin would have joined us,” Obi-Wan said dryly, though he didn’t find anything particularly amusing in their current circumstances. He’d been prepared to do it, but where they would have ended up didn’t bear thinking about. “Plo. Can you say that it would have been wrong to save Ahsoka from an unjust fate?”

Plo’s unhappiness at the turn the conversation had taken was clear in the Force. “No,” he answered. “But it would not have been the Jedi thing to do.”

Obi-Wan smiled thinly. “That, my friend, is precisely my point. The Jedi thing to do should be the right thing to do.”

“Yoda is right; you really are too attached.” The words were mild; Plo didn’t sound like he disapproved. He took a slow breath. “And yet you are a Jedi, Obi-Wan. And I cannot disagree with you. We are being consumed by the dark side.”

Not for the first time, Obi-Wan wondered what Qui-Gon would have made of all this. “I concur. Sidious has made us complicit in our own destruction, but we would not have been in this position in the first place were it not for our arrogance. We have lost our way.”

Plo didn’t reply immediately. Through the Force, Obi-Wan caught a flash of what he was thinking about: the arena on Geonosis, where so many Jedi had died. At any other point in the history of the Galactic Republic, two hundred Jedi on a mission like that would have been more than overkill, but the droids and the Geonosians hadn’t surrendered. If Yoda hadn’t turned up with the clones, Dooku would have killed them all. Perhaps that might have been preferable to everything that had come after, but Obi-Wan wouldn’t have gone along with it then and he couldn’t agree with it now, even knowing what he knew. And it should have been possible to back down from one battle, except that Palpatine and Dooku hadn’t wanted peace.

“The galaxy changed while we were shut up in this Temple, thinking that we had everything under control,” Plo said at last. “Our ability to use the Force diminished steadily, and yet we continued to act as though we knew best. As though we are the Force’s masters, rather than its servants.” He sighed. “We are paying the price for our lack of vision.”

Obi-Wan stroked his beard thoughtfully, a gesture he’d developed to look authoritative in front of his troops and which had now become an unbreakable habit. “The Council has spent a long time being concerned about the dangers of attachments. But there are other perils.”

Plo glanced at him. “Skywalker is a good man, and a cunning warrior,” he said. “And he is a very good Jedi Knight, attachments and all. We were not wrong to permit him to take the Trials; even with these revelations from Lothal, he has not failed the trust we have placed in him as far as I am concerned.”

“He has never let me down,” Obi-Wan said. Reluctantly, he added, “Not yet.”

If Plo knew what that acknowledgement had cost him, he did Obi-Wan the courtesy of not showing it. “Given time, I believe that we could sort through this,” the Kel Dor said, exhaling. “And that Skywalker could, as well. There is conflict within him, but if he can let go of his anger, his fear… But the Sith want to deny us that. Time is unquestionably running out.” He looked up at the tree, its branches spreading above them. Like the Jedi Order, it had stood for millennia, but its future was deeply uncertain. “This may be the last time I stand in this courtyard, or that you and I meet face to face.”

That was no different from any other deployment any of them had been on since the war had started, and in the past year the bombings had made clear that even the Temple was no longer safe. But it was different when you were knowingly being sent out to die for a lie, and you were aware that at any time your allies might be made to betray you against their will.

Plo’s comlink beeped from his vambrace, interrupting the grim drift of Obi-Wan’s thoughts. In the Force, he got the sense that the two of them were thinking along similar lines. “I’m due to depart for Cato Nemoidia.”

“I’ll accompany you to the landing platform,” Obi-Wan told him, and gestured for Plo to precede him out of the courtyard. “No matter what happens,” Obi-Wan said on their way to the turbolift, “I am grateful for your words today, Master Plo. And for your friendship.”

“I could say the same to you, Obi-Wan,” Plo said. “May the Force be with you.” When the lift opened onto the hangar bay, he strode ahead automatically, but then stopped and looked back. “I’ll see you on the other side of the war,” he said. “One way or another.”

 _There is no death, only the Force_. From his place standing just outside the turbolift, Obi-Wan smiled sadly, and raised a hand to his friend. “May the Force be with you.”

Tera was settling down on his couch with a pot of smoked Tatooine tea after the older younglings’ afternoon training session when he heard the chime at the entrance to his quarters. “Enter,” he called. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to see Mace Windu and Saesee Tiin standing outside when the door opened.

“Master Sinube,” the Master of the Order said, nodding respectfully as he entered the room. “I hope we’re not disturbing you.”

“Not at all, Master Windu,” Tera said, nodding a greeting to Tiin. “Please, sit down. Would you like some tea?”

Mace Windu, in Tera’s professional opinion, looked like hell. He’d been young to join the Council, though not as young as his former padawan Depa Billaba, who’d taken a seat alongside him a few years later in an unusual gesture of trust in their lineage. Cyslin Myr had been a friend of Tera’s; they’d grown up in the Order together, and he knew it would have pained her to see her former padawan, however illustrious, worn so thin and tired with care. There was an almost grayish cast to his skin in the late afternoon light of Tera’s small sitting room: like just about every Jedi fighting the war, he looked like he was coming apart at the seams.

Of course, he also suspected that Cyslin would have objected strenuously to Yoda and Windu’s decision to involve the Jedi in the Chancellor’s war in the first place, just as Tera himself did, and ultimately all of Windu’s cares could be ascribed to that choice. Including his former padawan’s disastrous mission on Haruun Kal, which had lost her that same Council seat, and very nearly her life.

Saesee Tiin by contrast looked as imperturbable as ever, which was even more concerning in its own way. If fighting the war hadn’t driven him to question everything the Jedi claimed to stand for, it could only have made him more convinced of his own rectitude, and that sort of attitude Tera distrusted above all else.

The two masters took their invited seats on Tera’s two spare articles of furniture, meditation cushions of the kind that were ubiquitous throughout the Temple. “We’ll pass on the tea, thank you,” Windu said, despite the fact that there were two spare cups on the tray: Jedi intuition. “Master Sinube, I’ll get right to the point: we need your help.”

Tera raised an eyebrow, sipping his tea. “My help? The Jedi High Council? Surely you’re not so desperate as to ask me to join your war effort. Again.” He set the cup down. “My answer hasn’t changed since the last two times.”

There was a short, fraught pause, flashes of emotion chasing each other through the Force around them. “Not quite,” Saesee Tiin said after a beat. “We have obtained…indirect evidence of a plot against the Jedi. We dare not entrust this information to normal communications channels, and we are therefore asking you to carry it to the commanders in the field.”

The words were anything but dramatic, but Tera felt them resonate in the Force, even dark and clouded as it had become. He took another sip of tea to cover his own flash of recognition. “Fascinating. What is this information that cannot be trusted to regular channels?”

Mace Windu sighed heavily. Whatever the information was, it brought him no joy. “We believe, though we cannot yet prove, that Chancellor Palpatine is the Sith Lord we have been seeking.”

“The Sith Lord?” Tera repeated, dumbfounded. “ _Chancellor Palpatine_ is Darth Sidious?”

Saesee Tiin looked at him sharply. “You know his name?”

“I have heard it in the underworld,” Tera told him, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. A paranoiac, as he’d suspected. “Not many have survived to even whisper his name, but I have had my ears to the ground for more than a decade.”

“And you didn’t report this to the Council?” Tiin demanded.

“Would you have listened?” Tera snapped. “You have no thought or care for anything that is not your precious war!”

Mace shot Tiin an unmistakable warning look. Tera could feel his tension in the Force. “Masters, please. Palpatine being the Sith Lord is not the only, or even the most important, news.” At Tera’s sharply raised eyebrow, he continued, “We have recently learned definitively that the clone armies were ordered for our use by the Sith.”

This time Tera just felt cold from shock. Shock, and the sharp knife of betrayal. “Really,” he said, his tail lashing. “And was there a reason the Council decided to hide this fact from the rest of the Jedi Order?”

The two Councilors glanced at each other again, and Tera at least had the satisfaction of seeing them look uncomfortable. “We thought it best to end the war quickly and so avoid whatever trap the Sith laid for us,” Saesee Tiin said, keeping his voice level. “In that, we have failed. But we have learned the nature of the trap.”

Tera’s long and successful career as a Jedi investigator had endowed him with the self-control to avoid giving in to his first impulse, which was to snap something about how if they believed that line about avoiding the Sith trap he had a bridge to sell them on Hosnian Prime. Mace seemed to sense his frustration. “The clones have all been equipped with an inhibitor bio-chip,” he said wearily. “When the Sith Lord triggers ‘Order 66,’ they will turn on their Jedi commanders and slaughter them all. We need you to tell the Jedi in the field about the chips, so that they can warn their officers and take precautions against being killed if the order is executed.”

The silence stretched for a long few beats. “How long have you known about this—this plot to destroy the Jedi?” Tera asked. The temperature in the room had dropped a few degrees, and with an effort, he took a deep breath, stretching out to the Force for calm. He wasn’t sure that Tiin had noticed his slip, but Mace shot him a shrewd glance.

“We learned of it today, Master Sinube, and no earlier.” Something in Tera’s expression must have needled him, for he added, “I swear to you.”

“And what value,” Tera asked precisely, “should I place in the word of a High Councilor, since you have just shown me your willingness to lie to your fellow Jedi?” Mace opened his mouth, but Tera wasn’t finished. “Do you even perceive your own arrogance?” he asked. “Are we, your brothers and sisters in the Force, just dupes to you? Does anything matter to you besides your own bloodlust?”

Saesee Tiin’s eyes flashed. “Strong words from someone who has refused to fight, Master Sinube.”

“Don’t condescend to me, _General_ ,” Tera told him, making the rank an insult. “I at least have not forgotten that there is more to being a Jedi than killing and dying for the Supreme Chancellor’s—excuse me, the _Sith Lord’s_ —power and glory.”

Tiin opened his mouth, looking thunderous, but Mace started talking before he could reply. “Master Sinube, I cannot deny that the war has led us badly astray. But if the Jedi are to survive at all, let alone redeem ourselves, we must be alive to do so. And for that, as I said, we need your help.”

Tera stared at him, not bothering to conceal his scrutiny in the Force, and Mace accepted it without comment, dropping enough of his shields for Tera to sense his absolute conviction—and sincerity. This kind of thing wasn’t infallible, but it was often the key to getting evidence that would be admissible in court.

Exhaling, Tera sat back, letting the scrutiny go. Mace twitched his shoulders slightly as he recovered himself. “I have served the Jedi Order for the better part of a century,” Tera said at last. “In this, I will not fail to do my duty.” He felt a whisper of certainty within his soul, and knew that he had spoken the words that had sealed his own fate.

Mace looked relieved, which was a dead giveaway of how much strain the Master of the Order was under: normally he had an excellent sabacc face. “Thank you, Master Sinube,” he said. “We are grateful, truly.”

Tera picked up his teacup again, and took another sip to cover his reaction. “When do I leave?” He tried to keep his voice light.

“Tonight, as soon as Madam Nu and her padawans finish calculating your route,” Mace answered. “She’ll send one of them to you with the data you need.”

“We’ll prep an ambassadorial shuttle for you,” Saesee Tiin added. He paused. “Though an Aethersprite would be less conspicuous.”

Tera wasn’t rated in the current Aethersprite design, even if they’d had a cockpit configuration suited to his tail, so it would have been an extremely short mission. He wasn’t sure whether Tiin knew that. Instead, he gave the other master a smile. “I’ll make sure to keep my hood up.” He wasn’t surprised when the councilor failed to take the joke.

Mace gave them both a look, but rose without further comment; Tera had the sense that he had many other tasks to accomplish. “Thank you again, Master Sinube,” he said, giving Tera a formal half-bow. “And if I don’t see you again before you go—may the Force be with you.”

“And you, Master Windu,” Tera said formally. Tiin stood up as well, and actually bowed to him before he turned to go, which was probably the least courtesy owed to someone who had just agreed to go out and die for your mistakes.

Tera finished the tea and sighed, pouring himself another cup from the pot before he turned, taking a good look around his quarters. Like most Jedi, he had very few possessions, and he had no padawan to whom his minimal effects would naturally pass. The one apprentice he had trained to Knighthood had died in the arena on Geonosis.

He could acknowledge, now that the war was about to claim him too, that their death had played no small part in his refusal to support the Jedi involvement in the conflict in the first place.

It occurred to him as he sipped his tea and watched the sun go down that there was actually one person who might find at least one of his possessions useful. Setting the teacup aside, Tera got up to find a datachip.

Obi-Wan was in the sitting room of his quarters, trying to meditate while watching the ceaseless traffic against the sunset, when he heard the door chime. Stretching out with the Force revealed the focused presence of an Jedi Master, and he unfolded himself from his tailor position to get up to answer the door personally.

He wasn’t expecting to find Tera Sinube standing outside his door, leaning on his sabercane. The old investigator didn’t look much different than the last time they’d crossed paths months ago, but something in his manner betrayed an edge of tension. “Master Kenobi,” Sinube said formally, “am I correct in surmising that you are in contact with Ahsoka Tano?”

Despite himself, Obi-Wan blinked. He and Ahsoka weren’t precisely in contact; Dex was putting all of the meals she ate at the diner on his tab, and Obi-Wan had asked his old friend to keep an eye on her if he could. It wasn’t much, but it had been all he’d been able to arrange in the face of the war’s escalating chaos. He had no idea whether she would appreciate the gesture, or whether she would simply resent his intrusion on her independence. In any case, she could have left Coruscant for good at any time; the fact that she apparently hadn’t said something, though Obi-Wan didn’t know what. He wouldn’t, until and unless they met again.

“I could be,” he answered, and then stepped back from the door, gesturing towards the sitting room behind him. “Won’t you come in, Master Sinube?”

But the old Cosian shook his head. “No, thank you, young Obi-Wan; I’m departing Coruscant for the Outer Rim tonight and there is still much to be done. But please—when you see Commander Tano, give her this, along with my regards.” He held out one clawed, four-fingered hand and dropped a datachip into Obi-Wan’s palm.

“What’s this?” Obi-Wan asked, turning it over in his hand.

“Some information that she may find useful in her future career,” Sinube said, and Obi-Wan felt a cold certainty in his soul: Sinube would never see Coruscant again. He looked up, startled, and met Sinube’s eyes, and saw that same knowledge reflected in the old investigator’s gaze. “When you see her, tell her that—” The Cosian hesitated. “Tell her to keep a close eye on that convor,” he said after a beat. “And to trust only in the Force.”

“Convor?” Obi-Wan repeated, but Sinube was already turning away. Obi-Wan felt the pointless impulse to call him back, and ignored it; what was there to say? Sinube obviously knew what fate awaited him on this mission, and Obi-Wan had no wish to appear to be devaluing his sacrifice.

It had once been more common for Jedi to have the sense that they were about to go to their deaths; it had been one of the reasons that Qui-Gon’s murder had been so shocking. Obi-Wan’s wild talent for precognition had only told him what was about to happen moments in advance, and Qui-Gon himself had had no notion whatsoever—at least not any he’d shared with his apprentice. Obi-Wan had encountered his share of Jedi on whom the hand of foreknowledge was resting heavily before the war; some of them liked to talk about it, but most didn’t. Between the war and the choking clouds of the dark side, however, hardly any members of the Order had had specific forebodings about their impending deaths in the past few years.

It might have helped them, or it might not. All that was left was for the survivors to mourn, and fight on.

Sighing, Obi-Wan put the datachip into one of the pouches on his belt and sat down on the meditation stool again, staring out at the darkening cityscape without seeing it. Had anyone asked about the few slow tears tracking down his cheeks, he would have pleaded eyestrain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The Phantom Menace_ is 21 years old today, and _Revenge of the Sith_ is 15. Raise a glass.
> 
> Jedi Council membership truthers: In ROTS both Oppo Rancisis and Eeth Koth are no longer members of the High Council--Koth has been replaced by Agen Kolar, and Rancisis's seat was given to Anakin Skywalker onscreen. Comics in the Disney-era EU have since had Koth being removed from the Council and leaving the Order pre-ROTS, while Rancisis is listed as a presumed Order 66 survivor; I have ignored both developments. Although this has never been discussed publicly, my working theory is that Koth would have died in either the Return to the Temple or the Yuuzhan Vong [arcs that were originally planned for S7/S8 of TCW](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Clone_Wars_Legacy), and this fic incorporates that assumption.
> 
> I'm [on tumblr](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/), where you can check out [my tag for this AU](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/tagged/another-shot-at-life). I also put my playlist for this AU [on spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4my3R3mPZvPuH22MNbbHH9).


	5. One Night on Coruscant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To love, is to trust. To trust is to believe.

Senator Padmé Amidala would have admitted, if pressed, that her hopes for her secret husband’s homecoming this time had been different from what eventually transpired: a hasty holocomm call from Anakin late in the afternoon, when she knew that he’d already been onplanet since the morning. In that same call, he told her to meet him at a bar in disguise in three hours, then signed off with barely time for an exchange of greetings, let alone an argument. Altogether it had been the opposite of what she was expecting, particularly given how rocky their relationship had become over the last six months or so.

Padmé actually debated calling him back once he’d bade her a hasty farewell and his image had blinked back into nothingness. It went against every protocol they’d established since their marriage, but she knew Anakin well, and she could tell that something was different, somehow, and she had half a mind to get him back on the line and ask him about it directly. Ultimately, however, she put caution over her own immediate desires, and went to consult with her handmaidens.

The disguise part was harder than it would have been three months before. Eventually Padmé and Moteé decided to repurpose her cowled indigo overrobe as a mantle, carefully applying face and body paint to give herself the appearance of an Umbaran. Most people in the upper echelons of the government and its social circles were uncomfortably familiar with Sly Moore, who more than lived up to her species’ creepy reputation: they were feared enough that Padmé didn’t anticipate anyone questioning her stately pace or her disinclination to talk.

Predictably, Moteé and Karté, who was assisting with her makeup, didn’t take her decision to go alone well. “My lady, you can’t,” Moteé said, dismayed. “In your condition—” Next to her, Karté didn’t say anything, but her distress and her agreement with her fellow handmaiden were obvious.

They had deliberately cultivated the habit of not referring to her pregnancy in any but the most general terms, even in private; while Padmé swept her apartments for bugs daily, she knew that she was being surveilled, and she didn’t want to take the risk of letting the truth slip. “You both need to stay here, Moteé,” Padmé said, trying to be firm. “Anakin will be with me, and in any case, I can take care of myself.” It was true; she was still in good shape, particularly for being in the third trimester, and despite the increased weight of the baby she was still fairly mobile, without much of the ligament or back pains that were apparently common symptoms. It helped that she’d been extremely active before her pregnancy; keeping up her exercise regimen had been one of the few constants in her life since her first election to the throne, and since the war had started she’d come to depend on its ability to clear her head and keep the despair at bay.

She’d planned to tell Anakin the news the next time he came home, but she was already starting to worry that some previously unknown Jedi business was about to call him away again. And some selfish part of her—the part that had decided not to terminate the pregnancy, the part that wanted a child despite it being a truly terrible idea on nearly every possible level—wanted his full attention when she did tell him. Even if she no longer felt that she could be sure of his reaction to the news, or that he would be willing to put her and the child first even if he was happy about it.

Moteé’s jaw was set. “I don’t like it, my lady.”

The common view of the handmaidens was that they were glorified servants, chosen for their ability to facilitate the infamous Naboo decoy obsession. Most people, especially on Coruscant, had no idea of the truth: the handmaidens were Padmé’s advisors, adjutants, and bodyguards, her friends and allies. If she wasn’t quite as close with her current complement of six as with those who’d been by her side since her first election as Queen, well, that just meant they hadn’t yet passed a trial by fire together. She trusted them with her life, and more than that, she trusted their judgement.

Padmé finished fitting her holdout blaster into its band, then tucked her second vibroblade into its sheath at the nape of her neck, hidden by the collar of the mantle where it met the headpiece hiding her hair. Her full-size blaster pistol was concealed within one of her voluminous pockets, and she had a vibroknife strapped to her opposite thigh beneath the mantle. “I don’t like it either,” she admitted. “But whatever Anakin has to say, he feels like he can’t say it here.”

Moteé and Karté exchanged glances. Whatever Anakin couldn’t say in this apartment was probably something none of them really wanted to know.

“Very well,” Moteé said at last. “But Ellé and Hollé will tail you in plainclothes until you meet Master Skywalker at the rendezvous point, my lady, and no objections.” She smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t want to explain to him or to Master Kenobi that we had lost you somehow.”

Padmé felt a small, answering smile tug at the corners of her own mouth: an unfamiliar sensation, these last few months. “I understand,” she told her friend, with mock gravity. “And I don’t blame you.”

Anakin had told her to meet him at the Outlander Club. From the sense of humor in the choice, Padmé was more than half expecting to see Obi-Wan at the bar fending off some sleazebag trying to sell him death sticks and deliberately sticking out like a lump on a glass plate. But when she did force her way through the crowd to the bar—made easier by the fact that when people saw her bald grey head and shadowed eyes, they were generally happy to get out of her way—she saw no sign of either her husband or his partner.

She ordered the weakest drink on the menu and concentrated on giving off a murderous air, which wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. The war was going badly, the Republic was falling apart, she feared for her husband, her marriage, her legacy, and her own life, and she was starting to think that she’d made the wrong choice six months ago. The idea of failing her responsibilities to her unborn child was somehow just as depressing as everything else put together.

Padmé stewed, her mood growing blacker, and when she felt a light touch on her shoulder she swung around, ready to bite the head off whoever had dared. But the tirade died on her lips when she met the eyes of the mouthwateringly handsome Kiffar Guardian who had dared to touch her—but he wasn’t a Guardian, Padmé realized; he was wearing the sleeveless, skintight black leather armor, but not the insignia. And he wasn’t a Kiffar; she looked at his blue eyes again and saw that it was Obi-Wan underneath the facial tattoos.

“Watch it, Kiffar,” Padmé said instead, speaking Umbaran, and he gave her an exaggerated bow before turning to the barman and ordering two shots of something bright green and floral—Nubian liquor, she realized. She’d seen Anakin drink it on occasion. Padmé waited while Obi-Wan downed first one shot, then the other, taking the opportunity to study him. The war had sharpened all of them, of course; she herself increasingly felt worn to the bone. But Obi-Wan had only become more dangerous and more distant as his cares increased. Only now, when she saw him out of his normal context of Jedi Master and High General, did she realize just how tired he looked—and how attractive she found him despite all that.

She forced her mind away from that idea with the ease of practice; her hormones had been all over the place since the start of the second trimester, and such thoughts weren’t fair to Obi-Wan, even putting aside the fact that Anakin would be hurt, and wildly jealous. She’d had the thought before, of course, back when Obi-Wan was still a Jedi Knight and Anakin was still his child apprentice: they’d been corresponding friends since the Battle of Naboo, and as soon as she’d come to Coruscant as a Senator she’d heard that Obi-Wan was the type of Jedi who hopped into bed with his friends—and that he had quite a lot of friends. Only after the First Battle of Geonosis had she thought to wonder if there’d been a reason she’d been the rare exception to his rule.

While she’d brooded, Obi-Wan had turned his glasses over on the bar, glancing at her as he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Padmé took another sip of her drink before leaving it behind unfinished when she followed him out at a discreet distance. From the way people didn’t seem to be able to quite look directly at her, she realized that he must be hiding her with the Force somehow.

They headed out a back entrance, then through a confusing series of sub-corridors out to an open-air taxi stand. Obi-Wan took the second taxi and gestured for her to precede him into it, keeping his hands on the well-worn blasters strapped to his thighs as he discreetly kept looking around. Padmé would have bet money that they’d managed to elude her standard pursuers, at least, but she didn’t take any time longer than necessary to get into the taxi. Obi-Wan swung himself in after her and they were off.

The taxi was the standard size, but Padmé’s robes were so voluminous that Obi-Wan was pressed up closer to the door than to the middle of his seat, leaving them regarding each other across an awkward gap of space. Uncharacteristically, Padmé met his eyes and said the first thing that came to mind. “You look tired,” she told him, switching back to Basic.

Obi-Wan’s lips twitched. “It’s good to see you too, old friend.”

“I’ve been worried about you,” Padmé said, trying to sound neutral. “Are you sure you’ve got this under control?”

Beneath the tattoos—but they had to be makeup, Obi-Wan wasn’t actually a Kiffar—his expression flattened. “No,” he said, with disarming honesty. “Are you?”

He had her there, and she wasn’t sure what they were actually talking about anymore. Not for the first time, she wondered just how much Obi-Wan knew. “No,” Padmé admitted, and they rode in silence for another few minutes until they pulled up in front of what was unmistakably a diner, with a sign reading DEX’S blazing over the building. “ _This_ is your meeting place?” Padmé asked. Somehow she’d pictured somewhere with more…panache.

The ghost of a smile flitted across Obi-Wan’s features. “Best nerfburgers in the galaxy.” He offered her his hand to help her out of the taxi; if he noticed the weight she’d put on during her pregnancy, he didn’t say anything. An actual analog bell rang somewhere within the establishment when they walked in the door.

Inside, a muscular Besalisk was working as the fry cook in the back, while a hassled-looking droid appeared to be the only server on duty. This, however, wasn’t a problem, as there were only a few customers at the moment. The only one not perched on one of the counter stools was a tired-looking Etti male with a scarred face sitting alone in a booth at the back. Padmé recognized him just as he looked up and smiled at her, the expression briefly lightening the air of gloom around him.

Obi-Wan sat down next to Anakin, while Padmé claimed the other booth seat for herself on account of her bulky robes. “Any problems?” Anakin asked, and Obi-Wan shook his head. “Good,” Anakin said, and pulled a little pod transmitter out of one of the pouches on his belt. Padmé couldn’t help but stare at him; the scar from his fight with Ventress had been enlarged to take over one whole side of his face, which was now a typical Etti shade of light blue. It made him look different: less like someone who’d grown up on a battlefield and had acquired the hair-trigger reflexes and temper to match. More like someone she could imagine growing old with.

The waitress droid brought over three cups of Jawa juice as Obi-Wan depressed the button on the top, and a green light on the base began blinking slowly. “This way we won’t be overheard,” he said, and he was Obi-Wan again, not some Kiffar outcast, though his outward appearance hadn’t changed. He shifted to look at her. “Really, an Umbaran, Padmé?”

The droid seemed to give up on anyone actually ordering anything and rolled away to check on another customer, one who was presumably actually racking up an appreciable bill. “I didn’t want anyone to bother me,” Padmé said, keeping her voice level. It wasn’t Obi-Wan’s fault that he had a way of making her feel like she’d entered a conversation when it was already in progress. “Why are we in this diner?”

“Dex is an old friend, and one of the most trustworthy people I know,” Obi-Wan assured her. Abruptly, Padmé wondered if “old friend” meant “old fling.” Was four arms what did it for him? _Focus, Padmé._ “Equally to the point, he has the best intelligence network in the Republic outside of Master Tholme. We may have questions we want to ask him.”

Distantly, Padmé registered the name of the Jedi Order’s slain spymaster, but that was less relevant right now. Instead, she looked at Anakin. “What’s so important that it couldn’t be said in my apartment?”

She didn’t miss the way Obi-Wan’s expression shuttered; Anakin looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Obi-Wan says you’re under surveillance,” he said after a beat, and Padmé once again felt the sense of being excluded, a sensation that was no less worrying for being familiar.

“Yes, I am,” she said. She’d never told him about her medical droid spying for Count Dooku, but that had only been the most subtle example. She was quite certain that his friend the Chancellor was responsible for many of the more obvious ones. “Didn’t you know that? And even if I weren’t, Senate gossip—” She broke off, glancing at Obi-Wan, who looked away.

“Senate gossip is full of the fact that we’ve been having an affair,” Anakin said dully, apparently not caring about Obi-Wan’s presence. His gaze was fixed on the table, and Obi-Wan was staring into the middle distance. Their obvious strain was slowly transferring to her; she could feel her shoulders tightening. “Padmé, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew,” Padmé said, looking between them. “I thought everyone knew.” Whatever ambitions she’d had of hiding the affair from the Senate rumor mill had been worn down by the relentless grind of the war to two far simpler hopes: hiding their marriage and her pregnancy, both of which she’d succeeded at thus far. As much as her staff found countless HoloNet blind items mentioning her titillating closeness with General Skywalker, and sometimes even with General Kenobi—and as much as several of her own impulsive decisions had fueled the flames of those rumors over the years—nothing about either of those two facts had yet come out, and Padmé was determined to keep it that way.

“I knew,” Obi-Wan said, his eyes very firmly fixed on the door and the cityscape beyond it. With the makeup, Padmé couldn’t read anything from his expression, and his voice was tightly controlled. “And the Council—”

“You told the _Jedi_ _Council_?” Padmé asked, her voice rising precipitously before she shut her mouth, cutting herself off. She didn’t fully understand the Jedi, but she knew enough from what Anakin had told her to know that the Council knowing about them was grounds for him to be thrown out of the Order. And if they did that, someone might get it into their heads to bring him up on charges of dereliction of duty, like Ahsoka had faced in her trial.

Obi-Wan turned his gaze on her, frowning, and Padmé’s spine stiffened involuntarily under the force of it. “No, I did not tell the Council,” he said curtly. “And to be clear, I won’t tell them that you are married. But they had more than enough evidence to suspect that you two were…close.”

“Had?” Padmé repeated, but Obi-Wan’s expression had shuttered, and he looked away again. Beside him, Anakin was looking increasingly miserable, and she switched her gaze to him; he was definitely the weaker point in their unit. “Ani, I don’t understand. What is this about? The Council found out about us?”

“No,” Anakin said, sighing. “Well, sort of. They don’t know about our marriage. But that doesn’t matter right now. Padmé, what we’re trying to tell you is that we found out who the Sith Lord is.”

None of this was making any sense, and Padmé stifled the impulse to reach across the table and shake him. “So the Jedi Council does know about us?” she asked, putting her hands on the table to steady herself. “How can that not matter? And what does a Sith Lord have to do with all this?”

Rather than answer her, Anakin shot a helpless glance at his partner. After a long moment looking at him, Obi-Wan turned to her and reached out to touch her hand, bringing her increasingly frustrated attention back to him. “The Sith Lord Darth Sidious is the one behind everything, including Count Dooku and the war,” he said quietly. “He was Darth Maul’s master, and now he is Dooku’s, in his secret identity as Darth Tyranus. The Jedi Order has been looking for him since the Battle of Naboo. Through a quirk of the Force, we have only just learned that he is Sheev Palpatine, the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic.”

It had to be a joke, or a lie, or a trick. “That’s not true,” Padmé said blankly. “That’s impossible.”

Obi-Wan leaned forward, holding her gaze with his; she recognized his use of persuasion body language even as her mind rebelled against what he was saying. “Padmé, are you sure about that? Palpatine working against the Republic explains everything you and Bail and Mon have ever said to me about his behavior since before the war began. All the doubts we’ve ever had, all the intelligence leaks, all the damage he’s done to the very foundations of government—it all fits.”

Jedi didn’t fight fair. Padmé blinked against a sudden surge of emotions, anger and grief and shock all compounded together to swamp her like a wave, leaving her blinking furiously against hot tears of rage. Belatedly, she realized that it was also partly pain: she’d slammed her hand onto the table and it hurt. Breathing hard, she looked up into her husband’s gaze; she saw her own misery and more there, and guilt, but also compassion. “Anakin, tell me this isn’t…”

There was no quarter in Anakin’s gaze. “Search your feelings, Padmé,” he told her. “You know it to be true, don’t you? Just like I did, when I found out.” He sighed, closing his eyes, his shoulders slumping. “Besides, it…explains why Palpatine has always been so interested in me. He wants to turn me to the dark side and make me his new Sith apprentice. He believes I’m the Chosen One,” he added, and even in four years of hearing Anakin’s complaints about the Jedi and the war she had rarely heard him sound so bitter. “I’d be the final twist of the knife in his revenge.”

Aside from Dooku, Padmé had little direct experience of the Sith. She knew them by the pain they left in their wake, as when she’d seen Obi-Wan shattered by Master Jinn’s death on Naboo, or again after Maul had murdered Satine Kryze. But she’d read the reports about Maul and Asajj Ventress, and she remembered the absolute coldness in Dooku’s eyes when he’d sentenced them all to death on Geonosis, and again when she and the other survivors had faced him at bay in the arena. The idea of Anakin becoming one of them chilled her to the core.

Just then, she felt the baby kick, and she covered the instinct to press a hand to her abdomen by reaching out across the table to Anakin, who took her hand in his organic one, squeezing her fingers gently. She wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t. She had seen too many freedoms trampled, too many rights set aside for the duration of the emergency, too many norms obliterated. “It does make sense,” she said, and she felt the weight of it settle onto her shoulders like a shroud. For another long moment, she could only sit there, focusing on her breathing, on the baby within her, on Anakin’s gentle grip on her hand.

Eventually, Padmé raised her head, looking at her husband and then his partner. This was the last thing she wanted for the galaxy, but she hadn’t saved her planet from an unprecedented and illegal invasion by shrinking from reality. “Like you say, Obi-Wan, it explains much.” She inhaled slowly, savoring the sense of rightness she felt in her next words. For the first time in years, her path seemed clear. “It also means that I’m the one responsible for all this.”

Both their expressions shifted to alarm, so nearly in unison that it would have been funny in other circumstances. “Padmé, that’s not true—” Anakin began, looking almost panicked.

“Padmé, you are not responsible,” Obi-Wan said, talking over him, and Anakin subsided, still visibly alarmed. “He has manipulated all of us for decades—”

“Don’t coddle me, Obi-Wan,” Padmé interrupted. “Palpatine may have been the one who suggested that I call for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum, but I was the one who actually chose to do it.”

“Because he put you in that position twice over!” Obi-Wan’s voice rose, but then he shut his mouth on whatever he’d been about to say, looking around the diner and taking a deep breath. “We were all of us manipulated,” he continued, lowering his voice. “And if anyone is responsible, it is the Jedi. Hunting the Sith is our first duty, and we have failed.”

“But we won’t fail again,” Anakin said, grim, squeezing her hand again, and Padmé registered a spike of alarm at his tone.

“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked, looking between the two of them.

Anakin grimaced, while Obi-Wan had the decency to appear faintly ashamed. “A lot,” Anakin said bluntly, and Padmé felt both the sting of it and a kind of relief. They’d always had a problem being totally honest with each other; even if he wasn’t telling her the full truth, admitting it was a step in the right direction. “Just—we’re going to take care of Palpatine, one way or another. The Jedi will, that is. And I won’t turn. If—if I don’t come back, it’s because I refused to turn. I saw what I—what he—did when we became a Sith, and I won’t let that happen. I’ll die before I let that happen.”

He looked so scared and so determined that Padmé’s heart wrung for him, just as it had on Tatooine nearly four years ago. “Ani, I know you won’t,” she said, putting her other hand on top of his. She glanced at Obi-Wan, who was looking out the door again, then squared her shoulders before she continued. “I love you. And I believe you.”

Anakin managed a faint smile, the ghost of his prewar cockiness rising in the expression. “I know,” he said. “Just—be careful around Palpatine, all right? You’re a threat to him, and now that we know he’s a Sith, we know he’ll do anything to get what he wants.”

If Palpatine wanted apprentices, he would probably also want to get his hands on a Force-sensitive child that he could use to manipulate or to blackmail Anakin—or her. Padmé didn’t try to stop the dread she felt at the thought, knowing that both Jedi would take it as a very reasonable fear for her own safety. For the same reason, she realized, she couldn’t tell Anakin about her pregnancy now; it would distract him when he needed it least and give him another reason to fear for her safety.

Which was the last thing either of them needed, because she wasn’t going to just be careful around Palpatine, and she knew in her bones that Anakin and Obi-Wan were wrong: he wasn’t just Jedi business, if he’d ever been. He was a threat to the Republic she loved, one that she herself had helped to put in place at its very heart, however unknowingly.

And by the stars and all the ancestors, she was going to make amends for her mistakes if it was the last thing she did.

Obi-Wan was regarding her narrowly, and Padmé regarded him right back, feeling very clearly that they knew where they stood with respect to Anakin, and to Palpatine. Where they stood with respect to each other was the real question, now that they’d stripped away several layers of the polite fictions between them. “Is Palpatine surveilling Jedi communications?” she asked abruptly, and Obi-Wan blinked.

“The public HoloNet, certainly, and possibly secure military transmissions too. Communications between councilors…most likely not, but we can’t be entirely sure. Accordingly, we aren’t willing to risk talking about this in any situation but face to face. And neither should you,” he added sternly. “These are Jedi secrets; the Council doesn’t know that we’ve told you.” And they wouldn’t approve, because the Jedi High Council knew best.

She knew that august body rather better than most beings, between the appearance of the Sith during the invasion of Naboo and her interactions with the Councilors as a Senator. That didn’t mean she appreciated the air of superiority she’d detected from several of them over the years, and even the hint of it from Obi-Wan set her teeth on edge. Padmé suppressed the urge to tell him that she wasn’t his apprentice and she didn’t take stupid risks. “I appreciate your trust,” she said instead. “But give me your comm code, just in case.”

He blinked again, but did as she said, and Padmé wondered whether the rumor mill among the Jedi included the same speculation about the two of them as the Senate gossip did. Comming Obi-Wan on his personal frequency wouldn’t help that, but it was beginning to seem like none of it actually mattered. If the Republic fell, they would all have bigger things to worry about than her and Anakin’s secret marriage and secret child.

Obi-Wan’s sigh interrupted her thoughts. “I have to get back to the Temple,” he said, and stood up. “Be careful, you two.” He put a hand on Anakin’s shoulder, and Padmé watched Anakin look up at him, his expression open but uninterpretable by her as something wordless passed between them. She was so caught up in her usual fears about Anakin’s loyalty to the Jedi that she almost missed Obi-Wan leaning down to press a kiss to her cheek.

It only registered as unusual when she glanced at Anakin and saw him staring at her wide-eyed. Back in his Kiffar persona, Obi-Wan headed towards the door without another word; it chimed when it closed behind him. “Anakin,” Padmé began, not knowing what she was intending to say, but all of a sudden he let out a sigh and his brittle expression crumpled.

“It’s okay,” he said, but he sounded like he was talking to himself. “I love him too, and I—I’m trying to be less jealous. Jealousy leads to possession, and possession leads to fear, which leads to the dark side. And that’s—him. _Vader_.”

There was so much going on in that sentence that Padmé didn’t even know where to start, though she didn’t miss the shudder that passed through him when he said the unfamiliar name, or the look of revulsion on his face afterwards. She made a note to ask Obi-Wan about that later; for now, there were more important concerns. “Anakin, I—what do you mean, you love him too?”

Anakin frowned at her. “You don’t?” He spoke with puzzlement, rather than hostility or anger; it was such a change from Clovis that Padmé’s first reaction was to make a joke about brain worms. But Obi-Wan was already within the extremely small circle of people that Anakin cared about, and she knew that he would never, ever be able to see his old master as any kind of threat. Evidently he’d decided to stop denying the latent attraction that she’d always suspected.

None of which actually answered his question, and he was her husband; she owed him that. “I—” Padmé felt herself blushing, which was ridiculous for a Naboo woman; her society embraced a variety of relationships in addition to, or in place of, two-partner marriage. She would have said that she and Obi-Wan were just good friends, but the idea of speaking a denial aloud seemed suspiciously dishonest. Particularly since she knew that Obi-Wan cared about both of them. “I don’t know what I feel for Obi-Wan, besides affection and concern,” she said instead, which didn’t feel like a lie. “And friendship. And you—”

“I’m really worried about him,” Anakin said, staring at the door that Obi-Wan had vanished through. It was like they were having two different conversations; Anakin was already several moves ahead of her on the board, while she was still back at square one with _Palpatine is the Sith Lord_ and _he wants to turn my husband to the dark side of the Force_. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am!” Padmé exclaimed, and her distress finally caught his attention: he turned back to her, and she had the sense that he was focusing her once again. Normally he was too fixated on her, especially during inopportune moments in public; not being the center of his attention was distractingly odd as well as bracingly pleasant. “And I’m worried about you, and me, and the Republic too. Especially you,” she added bluntly. “You’ve just been getting so—so angry lately. Since—” She hesitated.

Anakin winced, but he didn’t deny it. “Since Ahsoka,” he agreed, frowning, but the expression was more meant for himself than for her. “Yes. I know I haven’t—I haven’t been handling the war well.” That was certainly in the running for understatement of the century, but on the other hand, it was true of all of them: Padmé herself, entombed in fear and despair; Obi-Wan, immured behind ever higher walls of reserve; Ahsoka, sunk in paranoia and mistrust. To say nothing of the entire rest of the galaxy.

He looked up at her, as if for confirmation, and when she nodded, he went on slowly, as though he had to force himself to say it. “I think that’s how Palpatine got to me—is planning to get to me. That and you. He told me a while back—I think he was trying to make me wonder about you and Obi-Wan.” He sighed, and Padmé saw again how tired he was, the kind of fatigue that a good night’s rest wouldn’t even begin to cure. She couldn’t help but resent the Jedi and the Republic, just a little; the war-weariness every Jedi felt rested heaviest on her husband and his partner, because they were the two best Jedi in the Order. “I’m just tired of feeling afraid all the time.”

“So am I,” Padmé admitted quietly, and he looked back at her, startled. She rarely confessed to such things, but she gathered her courage and her thoughts and kept talking. “But Anakin, you could never lose me. Even if Obi-Wan and I—it wouldn’t be because either of us didn’t love you. Just like you and Obi-Wan doesn’t mean that you don’t love me. Even if we died, we would still love you.”

Anakin flinched, but he didn’t look away from her, and for once he didn’t immediately declare that he would never let that happen. Belatedly, she realized that whatever they weren’t telling her must be really, truly terrible; she hadn’t seen Anakin this openly vulnerable since before Shmi’s death, and his fear then had led him to act in the exactly opposite way than he was now. That should have been reassuring, but in her experience Jedi didn’t scare easily. “I think—I think I was so jealous of Clovis, before, because it felt like—like I had nothing to bind you to me besides our vows. And that I couldn’t really offer you anything.”

This was more familiar territory, and she now had a slightly better idea of what to say to get through to him. “Do you think I don’t feel the same?” Padmé asked, leaning forward. “You’re a Jedi, Anakin. You and Obi-Wan, and the Force—you share a bond that I can’t even understand. All I have to keep you by my side is our vows, and we can’t even admit to them openly.” She didn’t bother to hide the bitterness in her tone; she’d had the thought many times on her own in the night since the war began. What did a Galactic Senator have to offer, against the ineffable Force? Was there any chance that he would choose her and their child over the Jedi? Did she even have the right to ask that of him?

Anakin stared at her, studying her face and presumably her emotions in the Force, and Padmé looked back. Eventually, he let out a shaky breath, relaxing a little. “I guess we both—we should have told each other these things. If we’re both afraid, at least we’re not alone.”

“Of course we’re not alone,” Padmé said, finally letting herself feel a little of the relief she usually did in his presence. The news was beyond awful on pretty much every count, but he was here, and he hadn’t abandoned her or fallen to the dark side yet. Until then, she would believe in him. “And—when I went through handmaiden’s training, they taught us that fear can keep us alive.”

Anakin nodded. “Obi-Wan says the trick is not to let the fear consume us. To let it pass through us and leave only awareness behind. Or failing that, not to act out of fear.” That was a tall order for anyone, but the fact that he was admitting to his emotions was new, and an encouraging sign.

Padmé squeezed his hand again. There was something to be said for knowing one’s enemy; their true situation was even grimmer than it had seemed, but she felt as though she could finally see a few sparks of light in the darkness. “I think we can still save the Republic,” she told him. “If we keep our wits about us, and stay true to each other—it can’t be over yet. There is still hope.”

He smiled at her, the first true smile she’d seen since she’d walked into the diner. “If anyone can save the Republic, Padmé, it’s you. I believe in you. I always have.”

 _Are you an angel?_ Padmé hadn’t thought much about the days before the Battle of Naboo in years, but now she couldn’t help but recall the boy she’d met then, and the young man who’d become that boy’s master when his own master was killed in front of him. The three of them had set in motion more than they’d known then; it seemed fitting that they should be the ones to stop the damage they’d wrought. And while she had to admit it was bigger than all three of them now, she had no intention of turning back.

While Padmé knew now that Obi-Wan would probably have encouraged Anakin to stay the night with her, or at least tolerated it, she didn’t object when Anakin told her he was going back to the Temple. She had a lot to think about, and if she was going to continue keeping the secret of her pregnancy from him—them, really, since apparently Anakin and Obi-Wan were telling each other everything now, which was a vertiginously weird concept after nearly four years of secrecy—it would be a lot easier if he wasn’t around to see her undress. It had already been months of celibacy; she could wait a little longer.

Getting back into the Senate Apartment Complex without being noticed took a little more doing than getting out of it, but Padmé was well aware of where the camera blindspots and sensor grid holes were located by now. She made it back to the apartment without any problems, and she and the handmaidens began the process of transforming her back into a Galactic Senator, rather than a random Umbaran. When she was done, her own tired face looked back at her from the mirror: luckily, the weight she’d gained had mostly gone to her abdomen, and her features and overall body weren’t visibly very different. Keeping up the charade would have been much harder otherwise.

“Are you all right, my lady?” Ellé asked as she helped Padmé shrug into her favorite indigo dolman over her nightgown.

“No,” Padmé said frankly, looking away from her own reflection to meet her eyes. “The news isn’t good, Ellé. I’ll tell everyone at once in the morning. For now, I want to think through some things.”

Ellé frowned, clearly unhappy to hear that Padmé had no intention of going to bed. “All right, my lady,” she said after a beat. “Would you like me to bring you anything?”

“Lukewarm tea, please,” Padmé said, smiling slightly; it had become something of an in-joke between them all that she could no longer stand to drink hot liquids. She’d been managing the heartburn fairly well so far, but about a week ago hot liquids had become entirely intolerable. The handmaidens had evolved the strategy of bringing her a timer with her tea so that she could let it sit for ten or fifteen minutes before she drank it.

While she waited for her tea to cool, Padmé sat at her desk in the spill of light from her single lamp, turning her personal comlink over in her hands. In daylight, she would have been able to make out the spires of the Jedi Temple from the sitting room, and at night it was clear in her mind’s eye, just a few klicks away.

The revelation about Palpatine—Darth Sidious—was almost too big for her to contemplate; she felt as though she was back in the throne room on Naboo again, hearing the incomprehensible news that the Trade Federation’s escalating threats had suddenly transformed into a blockade and an invasion. Then at least her priorities had been clear: planetary defense, a diplomatic response, making sure that there was enough time in the schedule to pull off the decoy maneuver. Now she had so little idea where to start.

But she also knew that she would have to let her ideas about what to do about the Republic marinate for at least a night’s sleep before they would be useful. In the meantime, she had other concerns. With a sigh, Padmé keyed Obi-Wan’s personal frequency into the comlink. She set it into the desk terminal, so that when Obi-Wan finally picked up his bust holo appeared to be floating just above her desk, putting them at eye level.

He was only wearing a single shirt, and if he didn’t look precisely happy, he clearly wasn’t surprised to hear from her. “I’d apologize for waking you,” Padmé said, taking in his exhausted appearance, “but I don’t think either of us is sleeping tonight.”

Obi-Wan winced. “Probably not.” She realized that he must have nightmares too, just like Anakin did. The war was grinding them all into dust. “What can I do for you, Padmé?”

He kept his voice low, which probably meant that Anakin was back in his old room in Obi-Wan’s quarters. He’d mentioned to her more than once that he’d never more than partially moved into his own rooms after his Knighthood.

She couldn’t blame him for wanting comfort. “What you said earlier—” Padmé hesitated, thinking how to frame her thoughts. “What Anakin said earlier about him being the Sith Lord’s target. What did he mean when he said that Sidious believes him to be the Chosen One?”

She kept her voice level as she said it, and she held Obi-Wan’s gaze; this was a topic on which every Jedi of her acquaintance had so far refused to be drawn out. She’d gotten closest with Ahsoka, during their trip to Mandalore, but even Ahsoka had only said something vague about a prophecy before she’d said that she should ask Anakin instead.

In retrospect, it was obvious that Ahsoka had been keeping their secret for years, just as Obi-Wan had.

Now Obi-Wan sighed heavily, rubbing a hand over his face. “You mean that Anakin hasn’t told you?” There was a slight hesitation in his voice; it seemed like he really wanted the answer to be yes.

It wasn’t. “No,” Padmé said. “He hasn’t said it in so many words, but he has given me to understand that it’s Jedi business.”

Obi-Wan frowned. “May I ask…what did Qui-Gon tell you about Anakin, when you met him on Tatooine?”

Padmé stared at him, thinking back. At the time, she’d been consumed with worry for her people, and with desperation and concern over Qui-Gon Jinn’s plan to stake their ability to get to Coruscant on a young slave boy, however capable. _You Jedi are far too reckless._

__

__

_The Queen trusts my judgment, young handmaiden. So should you._ Typical Jedi arrogance, but events had vindicated Jinn’s decision. “He said that Anakin was special,” she said at last, “that the Force was very strong with him. And you remember Ani—I certainly wasn’t about to object to him coming with us to Coruscant. Or back to Naboo.”

Her chief memories of Tatooine these days were of Shmi’s kindness, overlaid with the heartbreak of their return ten years later. But she could remember other remarks from the day of the pod race now that she thought about it. _You carry all our hopes._

_I won’t let you down._

Obi-Wan had reportedly spent that time on the ship alternately talking down Captain Panaka and playing sabacc with Sabé and the handmaidens in between trying to restore the engines. The handmaidens had assured Padmé that his attempts to interrogate them had been extremely subtle. “I see,” Obi-Wan said now, frowning again. “I suppose it would have been unrealistic to think that he had told you, when the first I heard of it was in the Council chamber. I’m telling this badly,” he added; Padmé’s confusion must have shown on her face. “You are aware that it was wildly unusual for Anakin to be accepted into the Order at his age, correct? Normally no exceptions are made for any candidate older than four galactic standard years.” When Padmé nodded, he continued, “Qui-Gon believed that Anakin was the Chosen One, the subject of an obscure millennia-old prophecy recorded in the Jedi Archives. It was written that the Chosen One would bring balance to the Force.”

He stopped talking, and Padmé suppressed the urge to say something uncomplimentary about Jedi secrecy. “And?” she said after another few seconds. “What else?”

“That’s it,” Obi-Wan said, spreading his hands apologetically. “The Council has never made an official determination on the question one way or another; I suspect most of them don’t believe it, even now. Anakin is an extremely powerful Jedi; his midichlorian count is one of the highest on record. But midichlorians alone don’t make a Jedi; it’s the training and the Code and the Force itself that do. There were some who thought that Qui-Gon’s linking Anakin to the prophecy was a ploy to manipulate the Council into approving Anakin’s training.” His expression darkened. “I know that wasn’t the case. And in any event, it was Qui-Gon’s death and my defeating Maul that tipped the balance. When they Knighted me in the field and I told them that I was going to train Anakin myself, the vote was in my favor.”

“So Anakin may or may not be this Chosen One, which means absolutely nothing concrete,” Padmé said. “And yet this is enough that the Sith Lord wants to turn him? Am I missing something?”

There was a long pause, in which Obi-Wan stared at her, obviously considering what to say next. Eventually, he seemed to come to a decision and leaned forward into the pickup. “Padmé, what I am about to tell you is a closely guarded secret,” he said, lowering his voice, as though that actually mattered over a holocom. “For the past ten years and more the abilities of the Jedi as a whole have been…diminished. The dark side clouds everything; the Force is choking with it. Especially on Coruscant. So if Anakin is the one who can somehow restore the balance, cleanse the Force…that is a very attractive prospect in a way that it wasn’t, fourteen years ago. And for the Sith Lord, turning the Chosen One and preventing that restoration would be the final grace note in his victory.”

Padmé had seen Jedi abilities up close for most of those past fourteen years, and the last thing she would have said was that their ability to use the Force was diminished in any capacity. But from Anakin and Ahsoka she knew that the showy things like the lightsaber fights and the mind tricks and the whatever else were considered the lower, easier forms of Jedi praxis; the higher things like wisdom and the sense of connectedness with all beings and other mystical abilities were more prized. Jedi Masters were elevated to that rank partly in recognition of those skills, not just things like power and experience. Which implied strongly that the wisdom of the Jedi High Council these past few years had been…compromised.

As Anakin had said in the diner, it explained much.

Which meant there was only one question left. “Do you believe, Obi-Wan?” Padmé asked quietly. “Do you believe the Chosen One actually exists?”

His frown deepened. “The search for the Chosen One is the search for balance in every Jedi. But if you want facts, Padmé, I have none to give you.” He hesitated. “Before the war, I would have said no. But now, I am prepared to take a few things on faith.”

“May I ask what changed?” Padmé said.

Obi-Wan winced. “I would prefer not to answer that,” he said carefully. “Does the name Mortis mean anything to you?”

Mystified, Padmé shook her head, and he nodded thoughtfully. It was hard to read all the subtleties of his expression in the hologram, but she thought that he looked relieved.

Another strange name to put on her list of things to worry about, or more properly to interrogate Anakin or Ahsoka about the next chance she got, if she and Ahsoka ever met again. The subject seemed exhausted for now—and above all else she wanted to keep Obi-Wan talking, not give him an excuse to withdraw behind his implacable Jedi reserve again. Padmé took a sip of her tea, as it was finally cool enough to drink, and set the cup back down. “Anakin seems to think that the Sith Lord has been preparing to turn him for a while,” she said at last. “Am I right to think that what happened to Ahsoka was part of that?”

Obi-Wan brought a hand up to his beard, stroking it thoughtfully. “I hadn’t considered it,” he admitted, “but it would explain much of the irregularities in the process of her trial. And the haste with which it was conducted.” His expression tightened, and Padmé caught a glimpse of the predator that lay behind the mask of civility that he kept so carefully leashed. She knew that ferocity was always there; she’d seen it in the arena on Geonosis. But she wasn’t sure how many of his enemies, or even his friends, truly understood the inner fire that fueled him.

“But—to what end?” Padmé asked, though she had some idea.

He sighed. “One of the many reasons I never said anything about—you and Anakin, Padmé, is that it seemed clear that he does better with—connections.” He fell silent, and Padmé stopped herself from saying that it was no bad thing if the Jedi hadn’t made Anakin into a sociopath. “As I believe was Yoda’s goal in putting them together, Ahsoka was a stabilizing influence on Anakin. She brought out a side in him that few had seen before, or would have expected. When she left he—didn’t take it well.”

Anakin hadn’t taken Obi-Wan’s purported death well either; if that had been frightening, his despair over losing Ahsoka—and his absolute unwillingness to discuss his obvious heartbreak—had wrung her heart. “And he still hasn’t,” Padmé said quietly.

He nodded stiffly. “I never would have thought—the dark side is always there for all of us, in some way. Not turning is a choice we make every day. I assumed that Anakin felt it too, at times, and resisted the temptation; we all have, during the war, even—especially—me. Or have failed to resist it, as the case may be,” he added, his expression clouding over. “But what we learned showed us that at some point in the near future, for whatever reason, Anakin no longer had the wherewithal to do that. And if I were a dark lord who wanted to turn someone with a good heart and a great capacity for love, I would do so by isolating him from his friends and turning him against the people who—the people who love him.”

Padmé sat back in her chair. The sheer diabolical manipulation of it was stunning. “He’s evil,” she said at last. “Totally and completely evil.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “He is the heir to a millennium of hatred for the Jedi, and the accompanying plans to destroy us and the Republic we serve.”

His words fell into the silence between them, broken only by Padmé’s breathing and the soft whir of the holoprojector. She could feel the baby’s heartbeat ticking away within her, like a bomb ticking down to detonation. “Do you think Padawan Offee was working at his direction?” Padmé asked abruptly, sitting back up.

Obi-Wan looked distinctly pained; she knew that Offee’s former master was one of his close friends. “We never found any indications of that, but that doesn’t mean anything. Do you know the Mon Cal saying? ‘All’s fish, that comes to his net.’”

Padmé’s lips twisted, but she couldn’t deny the truth of his words. “So even if she wasn’t working at his direction, once she framed Ahsoka—”

“He saw the way to turn the situation to his advantage, and took it,” Obi-Wan finished.

Diabolical was truly the only word for it. “How can we fight that?” Padmé asked. “A thousand years—that’s as old as the Galactic Republic itself. And am I right to think that what you saw—that the hour is getting late?”

Anakin would have told her that she had no business thinking of it as a fight, that it wasn’t her job. He would have been wrong, of course, but Obi-Wan didn’t do that, which was part of why they’d been friends for more than a decade. “It’s very late,” he said heavily. “We have no exact information about timing, but we know that he is playing both ends against the middle. And as I’m sure you’re aware, the Republic is running out of resources, and the willpower, to fight this war.”

He was right; she’d seen the reports, and knew that even if peace broke out tomorrow the Republic had already functionally mortgaged its treasury for the next several centuries—though Palpatine nationalizing the Banking Clan had wiped out most of those debts. Even the Jedi Order was said to be running out of money, which would have been inconceivable four years ago; the Order’s finances predated the Galactic Republic, just like Alderaan’s or Chandrila’s.

That was a problem to think about, and Padmé made a note on her datapad. If she were Palpatine, already having turned the Republic into a near-tyranny, and secretly controlling the Separatists, how would she be planning to end the conflict once she’d destroyed the Jedi?

The idea of trying to work out how Palpatine thought made her skin crawl, but if she was going to stop him and save the Republic, it had to be done. Restoring the power of the Treasury was honestly not a bad place to start, and taxation had to be high on his list; if it had been the lever with which he’d prised open the upper echelons of the Republic’s government, he had to know just how important it was that a successor state hold that power directly.

Obi-Wan was watching her closely, his brow furrowed, and she wondered belatedly how much of her surface thoughts he could sense over the holocomm. Anakin had said more than once that most Force abilities required a visual fix, or proximity, and they certainly had both. “Padmé,” he said quietly, “I must remind you again to be extremely careful. Try not to take any meetings with him if you can help it. To hide himself so close to the Jedi Order, he almost certainly isn’t using his abilities actively for the most part, but what we have seen from him already—he has powers that we have forgotten, or never knew.”

“I’ll be careful, Obi-Wan,” Padmé assured him. She meant it, but being careful wasn’t the same as doing nothing. She tried to give him a smile, though she couldn’t say whether she succeeded. “Anakin would kill me if I wasn’t.”

“Maybe,” he allowed, “but I was thinking more about your sake. And mine.” Once he said it he looked a little chagrined; had he meant to let that slip?

If Anakin was sometimes too voluble about his emotions, it was usually extremely difficult to get Obi-Wan to admit that he had them at all, and Padmé took it as a small victory. She worried about him almost as much as Anakin in some ways. “Be careful yourself, Obi-Wan,” she reminded him. “I know you two want to—to bring him to justice. But I don’t want to lose either of you.”

She didn’t really expect him to make her a promise he had no intention of keeping; Obi-Wan kept his promises. “We will be as careful as we can.” He gave her the same wan smile, and she wished abruptly that he was there in person, so she could give him a kiss for luck. The thought was unexpected, but it brought back the memory of his kiss on her cheek earlier.

It was hard to tell with the holocomm’s blue tint, but she thought he was blushing ever so slightly. There was no denying that something had changed; Padmé met his eyes, deciding suddenly to lean into it, and let herself recall one of the more lurid dreams she’d had recently, featuring both him and Anakin. Obi-Wan looked away and cleared his throat. “Good night, Senator,” he said hastily, and Padmé couldn’t help but smile.

“Good night, Master Kenobi.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Padmé's Umbaran disguise is an adaptation of the outer layer of her Tatooine dress in AOTC.
> 
> Much of the background of the handmaidens, etc, is drawn from _Queen's Shadow_ by E.K. Johnston (2019). Karté appears in the _Forces of Destiny_ comics.


	6. Rocks and Shoals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where we are going always reflects where we came from.

The next morning Padmé awoke slowly, wanting to pretend just a few minutes longer that the galaxy hadn’t gone mad. It didn’t seem any more believable today than it had last night that the Supreme Chancellor was a Sith Lord whose masters had been plotting against the Republic and the Jedi for the past thousand years—but it was true.

At length she felt the baby kick and Padmé forced herself to get out of bed. She had no appetite to speak of, but she let Hollé bully her into eating breakfast anyway; her body wasn’t just hers for the time being, and her child didn’t deserve to suffer just because they were going to be born into an incomprehensible and broken universe.

After breakfast Padmé dressed in a green crushed velvet hooded gown with a high sashed waist and, accompanied by Hollé and Ellé in their long red patterned cloaks, made her way across the district to Cantham House, the Alderaanian pied a terre on Coruscant. As a mansion of the Elder Houses went, it was downright modest, but the salient point for her purposes now was that it was one of the few places onplanet that was unquestionably secure. The loyalty of the Royal Alderaanian Guard was beyond question, unlike the allegiance of almost every other security force on Coruscant, and Alderaan’s status as a founding member of the Republic meant that the Senate—and the Supreme Chancellor—had no practical authority in the compound.

The original purpose of the meeting had been discussion of some kind of gesture or statement to make in loyal opposition to Palpatine’s mounting tyranny, specifically the latest round of executive powers that he had scheduled to be voted to himself—not that any of them were willing to put it in so many words. Before last night she might have couched her statements in terms of Palpatine’s intentions, rather than the effects of his actions, but she could see now that she had been deceived into thinking that things were somehow less bad than they seemed: he had manipulated her and so many others into denying the reality that was staring them in the face. Always so mild mannered, the Supreme Chancellor. He only took those emergency powers because they were forced on him in a time of crisis. When the war ends he will readily give them up. He only wants what is best for the Republic.

Poodoo, as Anakin would have said. He’d gaslit them all, and she wasn’t going to take it anymore.

Well, maybe all of them except Bail Organa. He was waiting in the foyer of the manse when Padmé arrived, wearing a soberly cut day suit of dove grey, and he smiled when she held her hands out to him, kissing her on both cheeks in the fashion of Alderaanian royalty greeting their friends. She was honored to count herself among them. ”Padmé. It’s good to see you.”

“And you, Bail,” she told him, returning the smile, though it faded quickly. “I know I’m early—is there some place we can talk privately for a short while?”

Bail’s smile dimmed as he caught her mood. “My private office,” he said, and gestured down one of the corridors. “This way.”

The private office was small, furnished with tasteful Alderaanian pieces which looked to be valuable antiques to Padme’s half-trained eye. The only sign of Bail’s personal occupancy was the framed, informal holo of Queen Breha smiling from the desk; her official portrait hung in several places throughout the building. Padmé couldn’t help but regard those holos wistfully; she had no such photos of her and Anakin.

Bail must have noticed her staring. “I spoke to Breha just yesterday,” he said, smiling a little as he looked at the holo of his wife. Belatedly, Padmé wondered if she smiled like that when she talked about Anakin. “She sends her regards, and her wish that you may be able to visit Alderaan again soon.”

“I’d like that very much.” Padmé had very fond memories of her visits to Alderaan during her time in the Senate, failed assassination attempts notwithstanding. Those were almost common enough as to not be worth remarking.

“Please, sit,” Bail said, and Padmé didn’t protest when he pulled out a chair for her before sitting down behind the desk. Thanks to her pregnancy, her energy levels were no longer entirely predictable. Some people apparently enjoyed being pregnant; her mother had certainly made several remarks indicating that had been the case for her. Sola had found the experience fascinating, if not entirely pleasant, and that interest in the experience had carried her through with enthusiasm. So far Padmé felt the opposite: vulnerable, trapped, and uncertain by turns, rather than the radiant happiness that seemed to be the norm for others, even if her physical symptoms had been comparatively mild.

Perhaps it would have been different, if she’d been able to discuss her condition with anyone but her handmaidens. Or if the galaxy weren’t slowly consuming itself in the fires of war.

Thinking of the baby naturally led to a related question. “Have you made any progress on an heir?” she asked quietly, and Bail let out a breath as he sat down behind the desk.

“We’ve discussed it, as I’ve mentioned,” he said, folding his hands on the surface of the desk. “But with the press of the war…even though we could create a child out of our own genetic material, it feels wrong to bring another child into the galaxy when it’s in such a parlous state, and when we could adopt some child who might not otherwise know a safe and loving home to be a part of our family. We’ve always wanted a daughter.” The Elder Houses were so rarefied that they didn’t care whether Breha’s designated heir was her blood descendant or not. Other monarchies were not so enlightened.

Bail glanced one more time at the holo, then looked back at her. “What is it, Padmé?” he asked, not hiding his concern, and she wondered how much he knew, or guessed. He was friendly with Anakin, and friends with Obi-Wan, and he assuredly heard the Senate rumors.

Padmé inhaled, feeling the baby kick as she did so. Recently the baby seemed to be on a three or four day cycle of activity, and this was apparently the active day. “I know that we agreed to this meeting to discuss what kind of steps we should take in loyal opposition,” she said after a moment, gathering her thoughts. “But events have accelerated beyond what we anticipated.” There was no way to soften the next words. “Bail, it’s the Chancellor. I am reliably informed that he is a—a Sith Lord, and that he is secretly working with Count Dooku to destroy the Republic from without and from within.”

Bail blinked. “He is a _what_?”

“A Sith Lord,” Padmé repeated. She saw the puzzlement on Bail’s face; she was one of the few non-Jedi in the galaxy who had some idea what those words meant, in any sense beyond the academic. Which meant she had to somehow explain the terror of it. “A—a wielder of the dark side of the Force, one of the ancient enemies of the Jedi. They have been in hiding for a thousand years, waiting for their revenge, and now—this is it.” She raised a hand, gesturing towards the city and the galaxy beyond the windows. “Palpatine is working with Count Dooku, who is his Sith apprentice, to destroy the Republic.”

Bail sat back in his chair, his face slack with shock. “How do you know this?” he asked at last, then answered his own question before Padmé could decide how to frame her reply. “Of course, your Jedi. Do they have any proof?”

Padmé felt her cheeks heating a little at the plural of “your Jedi,” but she shook her head. “Nothing they could present to anyone in any kind of public forum, even if there were any that the Chancellor has not entirely compromised.”

“Too bad.” Bail’s mouth twisted into something too dark to be called a smile. “If we could prove he was a Force user, we could make a very airtight case for his removal on the grounds of violating the Ruusan Reformation.” He sighed, the expression falling away. “If you had told me this four years ago, Padmé, I would have said you had been overcome by paranoid delusions. But now…it makes too much sense. All the emergency decrees, the executive orders, the rights infringed or suspended…we’re most of the way to a dictatorship already thanks to the war.”

“Indeed,” Padmé said quietly. “All of it instigated at his own direction to create the very situation where he can declare himself Emperor of a new order in the galaxy.”

For a long pause there was only silence in the room, broken by the slow ticking of an antique analogue clock somewhere: typical Alderaanian luxury. “Stars above,” Bail murmured eventually, staring at the desk. “All those speeches from Dooku in the Senate…all those people who flocked to his banner…and it was all lies. I always wondered why Palpatine didn’t fight harder to keep the Separatists in the Republic, before the war began.” He looked up, his dark eyes keen. “Why have you told me this, Padmé? What are you thinking?”

“Ana—Generals Kenobi and Skywalker don’t want me to do anything,” Padmé admitted. “They don’t even want me to tell anyone else. But we can’t leave it all to the Jedi; I won’t.” By the terms of that same Ruusan Reformation, the Jedi weren’t even supposed to participate in the galactic government. More and more that looked like a grave mistake. “I need to know who else in that meeting you would trust with your life. And then I want us to come up with a plan to restore the Republic. We can't let a thousand years of democracy disappear without a fight.”

Bail stared at her, searching for something that he seemed to find, for at length he nodded slowly. “It will be very dangerous,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. “We can’t tell anyone. Not even our families.” Ever after, she would remember the fact that he hadn’t questioned her decision.

Unspoken was the near-certainty that their families would pay a high price if they failed regardless of whether they knew anything. “I’m not afraid to die,” Padmé said, which was the truth. She feared failing her responsibilities, to her planet and to the galaxy; she feared the death of the Republic, which no longer seemed unthinkable but instead nearly inevitable. She didn’t fear the end of her own life, and she hadn’t since she was fifteen, battling through her own palace to free her planet from an illegal occupation. “And I am perfectly capable of keeping secrets from the Jedi, for the record. They have certainly kept their fair share of secrets from me.” That was the truth too; she didn’t have time to argue with Anakin and Obi-Wan about the wisdom of her acting to save the Republic. There was only enough time to either do so, or not.

“Hmm.” Bail stared into the middle distance, tapping his fingers on the desk as he thought. After a minute he inhaled. “Mon, of course,” he said. The Senator from Chandrila was a friend to both of them, and would have been Padmé’s first choice if Bail had put the same question to her. “I would trust her with my life.” He glanced at the clock on his desk. “We’ll have to bring her into this after the meeting, however. The others should be arriving soon.”

He rose, and Padmé rose with him. “Thank you, Bail,” she said as he came around the desk, and he looked at her with some surprise.

“What for, Padmé?”

“For believing me,” Padmé said, swallowing around the sudden lump in her throat; she was distantly horrified to realize that she was on the verge of tears. _Damn_ hormones. “And for not pointing out that a significant portion of this whole mess can be laid at my feet.”

“With all respect, Padmé, I don’t believe that’s true,” Bail said. His voice was quiet, but his tone was firm. “If you have made mistakes, so have we all. And you are not responsible for the actions of a—a Sith Lord. His crimes are his own.”

It almost sounded believable, coming from the Prince Consort and Senator of Alderaan. Maybe in time she would even be able to accept it. “That may be true,” Padmé said, stepping into the hallway where Hollé and Ellé were waiting. “But the consequences of them belong to us all.”

It wasn’t every day that the two best duelists in the Order held an open sparring session, especially during the war, and it was still less common that Caleb was actually onplanet for it. Master Billaba had released him for the day, since she was booked solid with meetings at High Command; he’d been running through a solo obstacle course, one of the ones that Master Beq had set for his age group, when a human youngling had stuck his head into the room and told him the news, making no attempt to conceal her excitement. Caleb couldn’t suppress his own grin as he shut down the course and hurried out into the corridor, but at least there was no one around to chide him for his un-Jedilike glee.

Master Kenobi and Jedi Skywalker were in one of the gymnasia that was equipped with bleacher stands for spectators. As Caleb entered the room, he saw that they’d opted not to configure the room’s terrain in any particular way, but they’d positioned racks of spare lightsabers to both sides of the floor. After the war began the Order had made it policy to retrieve the weapons of fallen Jedi if at all possible, to keep them off the black market, and there were now many, many spare lightsabers floating around the Temple. There were also quite a few on the black market despite their best efforts, according to the gossip from those few Jedi investigators remaining. General Grievous was said to possess several dozen, all taken from Jedi he’d killed personally.

Though Caleb normally only had eyes for Master Kenobi, as he sat down on a free patch of bleacher a few rows up he couldn’t help but look at Jedi Skywalker, whom gossip said took after his master. Obi-Wan Kenobi was famous for the fact that he didn’t cheat death, but instead won fair and square. Rumor said that Anakin Skywalker was one of the most powerful Jedi alive, powerful enough to make his own luck.

Caleb reached out to the Force like he’d been practicing with Master Billaba, trying to let it guide his perceptions as he focused on Jedi Skywalker. He was a nova in the Force, a fountain of light shot through with shadows, but Caleb thought the shadows seemed a little more tightly wound, his entire presence a little more reined in than he remembered. He’d passed Skywalker in the hall once not long after his padawan Ahsoka Tano had left the Order, and felt very nearly strangled by the anger and hurt he’d been radiating.

Today there was none of that, only the blank focus of control, mirrored by the expression on his scarred face. The two most famous Jedi in the Order seemed a bit more serious than usual for a practice duel, crossing to the weapons racks around the room and examining the blades on them carefully. Caleb saw Master Obi-Wan select a spare lightsaber from one of the racks with a frown before clipping it to his belt. On the other side of the room, Skywalker was saying a few words to the Rodian and Tholothian younglings who were carrying boxes of junk to the floor of the gymnasium, turning the contents within—meant to increase the difficulty of a practice bout, containing a higher and higher proportion of droid parts since the war began—onto the floor and scattering it around with the Force.

The two younglings left the training arena and took seats on the benches in front of Caleb, glancing at him as if asking for permission, and he gave them a smile. They all turned back to see Master Kenobi and Jedi Skywalker starting to move, circling each other warily. Both were flipping their lightsabers around in their hands as they did so, a nervous tic which could also be used to generate more power in the Force.

Caleb half-expected Master Kenobi to take up his preferred position, the opening form of soresu, but apparently he had other ideas today. As the two Jedi circled, he could sense their concentrated willpower roiling between them, changing the shape of the Force itself. Skywalker had more power, but Master Kenobi had more control, which only made sense, as he was a Master on the High Council. But the difference between them seemed very narrow.

He was still pondering what his senses told him when, between one breath and the next, they moved.

Skywalker swept in low, feinting to the side before whirling counterclockwise to aim an upper thrust at Master Kenobi’s torso, but Master Kenobi’s blade was there to block him. He flipped around Skywalker’s blade, landing behind him to slash at his unprotected back, but Skywalker spun and blocked his blade, their lightsabers clashing in a flurry of parried blows that even Caleb, with his Jedi senses fully focused on them, could barely track. Their blades wove around each other for a long span of seconds, as if they already knew each other’s moves before they made them.

Kenobi aimed a high kick at Skywalker’s face and he turned the momentum into a back flip, landing on his feet several meters back as Kenobi moved in, tacking from side to side like a predator. Skywalker raised his blade in one hand, then gestured with his left, summoning some of the droid junk to hurl at Kenobi with the Force.

But the Jedi Master simply raised his own hand, his nostrils flaring, and the junk stopped dead in the air, quivering with halted momentum. Kenobi closed his fist, and the junk exploded into dust and fragments.

“Can he do that?” the Tholothian youngling whispered, and Caleb frowned. It wasn’t unheard of by any means—but it was a remarkable display of ability, even for a Master.

The fight hadn’t stopped; Skywalker had used the distraction of the junk to rush Kenobi, and they were grappling now, their lightsaber hilts and wrists locked between their chests, too close to use. Caleb could just make out the exultant expression on Skywalker’s face, and its muted twin on Kenobi’s.

It was weirdly comforting to know that he wasn’t the only Jedi who enjoyed fighting for its own sake.

Abruptly, Skywalker lunged back and pivoted to sweep Kenobi’s feet out from under him, then lunged forward, slamming his saber down hard. But Kenobi wasn’t there anymore; he’d gone down in a backwards roll and now popped back up a few meters away, staring at Skywalker intently. Some signal passed between them; Skywalker nodded, raising his left hand, and Kenobi took his second blade off his belt and ignited it.

It burned purple, and Caleb frowned, wondering whose it had been. The thought was driven out of his mind when Kenobi rushed forward, moving with the speed of the Force. Skywalker caught both blades on his one, then twisted his wrists and disengaged to duck under Kenobi’s purple saber, trying to get inside his guard. But Kenobi flipped backward, then forward to one knee behind Skywalker, who parried his slash behind his back before whirling to block his other blade as Kenobi rose.

Kenobi pressed him, slashing with each blade in turn, but Skywalker was too fast, blocking each strike and giving little ground. Switching his saber to just his gloved hand, he raised his left and sent Kenobi flying with the Force just as the Master put all his weight into another downward blow.

“Padawan Dume?” the Rodian youngling asked him quietly. “What do you see?”

Not taking his eyes off the fight, Caleb moved down to the next bench to sit between the two younglings. “They’re very well-matched,” he said, watching as Kenobi twisted in midair, landing in a three point crouch with both blades still lit, the purple one just centimeters above the ground in his reversed grip. Skywalker closed the distance between them and Kenobi caught his blade between his two, the crackle of interference rising louder. “But Master Kenobi isn’t normally a dual wielder. I think they’re testing something.”

“I think you’re right, padawan,” a new voice said from above them, and Caleb half-turned to see his own master sliding onto the bench above them. Depa Billaba shot him a quick smile, then turned her own gaze back to the fighting.

Master Kenobi and Skywalker had registered her presence too, both glancing up briefly from where they were circling one another once more. “Master Billaba!” Kenobi called. “Join us!”

She stood up, shedding her cloak on the bench as she did so. The smile that lingered on her face transformed into an expression of fierce anticipation. “And am I playing the antagonist here, Obi-Wan?”

“Somebody has to!”

“Very well.” Master Billaba ignited her green lightsaber, holding it close to her body in a position that looked suspiciously like the opening guard stance of Form II. But no one in the Order studied Form II; the one Jedi in the last century who had now stood on the side of the Sith.

She leapt into the air, tucking herself into a ball, and landed between Skywalker and Master Kenobi, who tossed her the hilt of that purple lightsaber. She ignited it with a smile, and then they were off.

Caleb had heard the whispers around the Temple, that he was too young to be a padawan, even in wartime, and that his master was damaged goods after she’d spent six months in a coma recovering from the Haruun Kal disaster. But looking at her, he couldn’t believe it. Master Billaba moved with the fluid grace of the best duelists, and though she wasn’t a dual wielder by training, she was keeping up with Kenobi and Skywalker, who pressed her up and down the gym without gaining any obvious advantage.

Master Billaba’s master was Mace Windu, the Master of the Order and the only living student of Form VII, the dangerous art. Caleb could sense her opening herself even further to the Force as Kenobi and Skywalker seemed to hone in, taking greater risks and leaving greater gaps in her guard as she moved to counter their strikes. Form VII required carefully controlled ferocity, even rage, to walk within the shadow of the dark side. He could feel her emotions, normally so well leashed, roiling through the master-padawan bond between them.

But it wasn’t enough. Skywalker pivoted around the blade she blocked his blow with and slammed a kick into her wrist, then reached forward with his right hand to wrench the purple blade out of her grasp with the strength of his artificial arm. Master Billaba used his grip as an anchor, bringing her legs up to kick him in the torso and flipping back up over his prone form to block Master Kenobi’s backhand blow as he flipped his blade back up into the obverse grip. He disengaged and grabbed her arm, turning into her body to put his back to her chest with the beam emitter of his deactivated lightsaber against her neck.

Her lightsaber still glowed green in her hand, but if she turned it on him she’d decapitate herself too. After a moment, Master Billaba deactivated her blade, and Master Kenobi let go of her arm, stepping away. Skywalker had regained his feet in a defensive stance, but he straightened, hooking his own deactivated lightsaber back onto his belt.

Caleb was off the bleachers and crossing the floor towards them immediately. “You two are good,” Master Billaba said to the other two Jedi, accepting the bottle of water that Caleb handed her. He gave one to Master Kenobi too, who smiled at him, and Jedi Skywalker, who gave him a nod.

“We have our moments,” Master Kenobi said lightly, and Skywalker snorted.

“Let’s hope it stays that way,” he said, taking a long drink from the bottle. When he’d swallowed, he looked back at Master Billaba. “You don’t fight the way you used to.”

He probably hadn’t intended the words to sound like an accusation, but she met his gaze squarely. “I was a different person before Haruun Kal, Skywalker. My fighting style isn’t the only thing that has changed.” Skywalker shot a glance at Master Kenobi, but Master Billaba was looking between the two of them. “Care to enlighten the rest of us as to what you’re so worried about, Obi-Wan? Dooku isn’t a dual wielder.”

“That’s true,” Master Kenobi agreed. “But I have met other dark siders who were. And General Grievous can wield up to four blades at once.”

Master Billaba frowned. Caleb caught the edges of her scrutiny in the Force, but Master Kenobi was a blank wall, and after a moment she exhaled, letting it go. “Have it your way, Master Kenobi.” She caught Skywalker’s eye, giving him a nod, which he returned.

Caleb wanted to stay and see what else Master Kenobi and Skywalker might do, but he could tell that Master Billaba wanted him to follow her. Their master-padawan bond was still new, and her using it to convey a summons was a way to test its strength. He followed her out the door of the gymnasium, unable to resist one glance back as they neared the door. Kenobi and Skywalker were talking quietly, oblivious to the younglings on the bleachers still hoping for more.

“What did you think, Caleb?” Master Billaba asked when they stood outside in the corridor.

Caleb inhaled, marshaling his thoughts. “They’re the best,” he said after a beat. “It was obvious that you were outclassed, Master—no offense,” he said hastily, and she smiled faintly.

“None taken.”

“Right. Well, they’re extremely well-matched.” _Like two halves of the same warrior_ , he thought, but didn’t say. “I think Master Kenobi is better, but not by much. Jedi Skywalker is said to be terrible at dual wielding, but the way he uses the Force with his organic hand, it almost doesn’t matter.”

Master Billaba raised an eyebrow. “By ‘terrible,’ you refer to the fact that Count Dooku cut off his arm when he attempted jar’kai against him on Geonosis.”

“Er—yes, Master,” Caleb said, running a hand through his hair. “Everyone’s heard about it.”

She nodded. “And your conclusion?”

“Two blades isn’t always better than one,” Caleb said without hesitation. “If you’re unfamiliar with how to use both at once, you may wind up degrading your own skill and put yourself in a worse position.”

“Well said. Overconfidence can be a fatal weakness, especially these days.” Master Billaba was silent for another few meters of corridor. “It’s not entirely General Skywalker’s fault. Count Dooku is a master duelist, and until the war we didn’t encourage or train dual wielding very much. There were exceptions like Master Krell and Master Reus, and a few people who dabbled in it briefly, like Master Kenobi.” She sighed, then added, “In this case, Jedi gossip may be behind the times. General Skywalker dueled and defeated Barriss Offee right here in the Temple, two blades to two.”

“His padawan—” Caleb began, then cut himself off. Talking about Ahsoka Tano was something that everyone did, but only amongst one’s fellows. He’d debated her choice endlessly with his fellow younglings, but never dared to speak to any Knights or Masters about it. He couldn’t imagine that the Knights or Masters had similar discussions.

He couldn’t imagine making her decision, but the Order hadn’t betrayed him the way it had her. He thought, in his heart of hearts, that he could understand it—but he also thought that she should have trusted the Order first, rather than immediately going on the run when Offee had framed her in the cell block. If the Jedi had not kept faith with her, she had also failed to keep faith with the Jedi.

If Master Billaba was aware of the fervent debates on this topic, she didn’t show it.“Yes,” she said. “His former padawan Ahsoka Tano chose to study ataru, the one true jar’kai form, and by all reports was quite good at it. He clearly learned from instructing her, as is the way of a good master-padawan relationship.”

Caleb fervently wanted that kind of relationship with his master, but saying it aloud felt arrogant. “It’s too bad that no one in the Order studies Form II,” he said after a moment. Dooku hadn’t killed as many Jedi as Grievous had—no one since the Sith Wars had killed as many Jedi as Grievous had—but he was said to be a ruthless and formidable opponent all the same, which only made sense; Form II had been developed long ago in the Sith wars specifically to counter lightsaber wielders. Master Kenobi and Skywalker had both survived multiple duels with the former Master, which was more than most people could say, even if Master Yoda had had to rescue them from the first one.

Master Billaba’s lips quirked. “It is indeed.”

They walked another few meters of corridor, passing the courtyard where the Great Tree stood. Only a few months ago Caleb had been one of the younglings who had drilled out there under the watchful eyes of Tera Sinube and Kelleran Beq; now Master Sinube had left Coruscant on some secret mission for the Council, and he was the padawan of the woman who had been the Master of the Order’s student.

Master Billaba seemed to realize that he had something on his mind. “What is it, padawan?” she asked as they turned the corner, leaving the windows that gave onto the courtyard behind.

Caleb had meant to ask where they were going. Instead when he opened his mouth what came out was, “I hope Jedi Skywalker and Master Kenobi never have to fight each other for real.” He blinked, frowning, wondering where the thought had come from, but he was distracted from the question by Master Billaba, who had stopped dead.

“Caleb,” she asked quietly, turning to face him, “what makes you say that?”

“I don’t know,” Caleb answered honestly. “I just—felt it somehow.”

Master Billaba nodded slowly. Through their bond, he could feel that she was somewhat unnerved, though he didn’t understand why. Kenobi and Skywalker were the strongest and the best Jedi left in the Order, or at least, that was the consensus among the Jedi his age. It was inconceivable that either of them would ever feel the need to face each other on the battlefield; that only happened when someone turned to the dark side. “Well,” his master said at last, “when you’re right, you’re right. And I think everyone in the Order would agree.”

“What do you think?” Anakin asked Obi-Wan quietly after Master Billaba and her padawan had gone. They hadn’t lost any other members of their audience, though; out of the corner of his eye, he could see the younglings still watching eagerly from the bleachers.

Obi-Wan had the makings of an impressive bruise coming in on the side of his jaw where Depa Billaba had kicked him in the face. Anakin lifted a hand to it, gathering the Force to bring down the swelling, and Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow at him. It was the kind of gesture that Jedi made with one another thoughtlessly all the time, but there was no more pretending that this was thoughtless. Anakin met his eyes, not hiding his feelings, and Obi-Wan looked away.

He lifted one shoulder in a gesture too refined to be called a shrug, then ruined the picture when he winced; the motion must have troubled fresh bruises. “Master Billaba’s new style is much more frenetic than it once was.” Recognizing that he was temporizing, Anakin waited, dropping his hand from Obi-Wan’s jaw once the swelling faded. After a beat, Obi-Wan let out a breath. “The Sith Lord must be powerful,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s anyone in the Order who can approximate his presumed level of skill, let alone Jedi who also dual wield.”

Anakin grimaced, agreeing. They were the best duelists in the Order, with the possible exception of Yoda, and privately, he wouldn’t have put money on the Grand Master since he’d returned from his mysterious journey with Artoo. There weren’t many dual wielders among the Jedi; Ahsoka’s decision to specialize in ataru had been as much due to her assessment of her duels with Ventress and Grievous as it had been her natural inclination. He’d gotten better at countering jar’kai thanks to teaching her; Obi-Wan had teased him many times about being able to teach it but not do it himself. That teasing had stopped after his duel through the Temple with Barriss Offee.

But Ahsoka was gone. Pong Krell had been a dual wielder, and Barriss Offee had certainly seemed to have a knack for it when she’d dueled him using Ventress’s stolen sabers. That left… “Didn’t you say Master Windu studied ataru for a while?” he asked. The Master of the Order was the only living practitioner of Form VII, the path in the dark, as Yaddle had termed it when Anakin had been taking his remedial classes. Depa Billaba combined elements of VII with Form III to form her own personal style, which she was doubtless even now imparting to her young padawan.

“That’s true,” Obi-Wan said thoughtfully, stroking his beard. “As a matter of fact, he taught me the basics at my request after I became a Knight. We could ask him. Also possibly Master Fisto; I believe he used it against Grievous after his apprentice was killed.”

Speaking of Kit Fisto… “There’s also Master Reus,” Anakin said. “Is she still alive?”

Obi-Wan grimaced. He and Keelyvine Reus hadn't gotten along on their joint missions, which was unusual; normally he was quite good at charming senior Jedi, while Anakin was the one who antagonized them. “Last I heard, yes, which I must admit is an impressive achievement.” Anakin registered the faint, dry note of sarcasm. “She and Padawan Xebec are currently in command of the siege of Sluis Van.”

The Council had foisted Reus’s current padawan on her when his former master had been killed; they’d been wildly mismatched, and Obi-Wan had predicted to Anakin that if they didn’t learn to trust one another they’d both be dead within six months. Reus had struck him as willfully abrasive, particularly for a Jedi Master, but he’d liked Xebec fine. Anakin hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask whether Reus and Xebec reminded Obi-Wan of the two of them, but he’d found himself secretly rooting for them.

What had been the wildly unusual practice of the Council assigning padawans to masters at the start of the war had only become increasingly common as it dragged on and more Jedi died. These days every trustworthy general was routinely asked to take on a padawan whose first master had been killed, and there were still a few dozen padawans hanging around the Temple who hadn’t yet found replacement masters. At the current rate, Anakin suspected that they were only a few months from masters taking on multiple apprentices, which hadn’t been done since the generation after the Ruusan Reformation a thousand years ago.

He himself had not been asked to take on a new padawan, which meant that either the Council didn’t consider him trustworthy or that Obi-Wan had intervened to avoid putting him in the position of having to tell the Council that he would see them in the last cold hell first. He wasn’t sure which alternative he preferred.

Not that it really mattered now, when Palpatine was on the brink of murdering them all. “If Reus is all the way out on Sluis Van, she couldn’t be recalled in time to make a difference, most likely,” Anakin pointed out. “And I’m sure the Council would say she’s needed where she is.” Which was a shame; Dooku himself had trained Reus in lightsaber combat, and she’d survived a duel with Ventress, which was more than could be said for many other Jedi. That left an assortment of part-timers, including him, who had lost an arm the last time he’d tried to dual-wield against a Sith, versus a Sith Lord who had spent his entire life practicing to use it to destroy them and all the Jedi. Great.

Obi-Wan was eyeing him with poorly concealed concern, doubtless having caught the grim drift of his thoughts in the Force. Anakin took a breath and straightened his shoulders, giving him a nod. He didn’t want to keep hiding his feelings from Obi-Wan—that had led them straight to disaster in the near future, apparently—but he wasn’t constantly about to fall apart, either. And he wasn’t going to let the temptations of the dark side, whether anger, fear, or despair, bring him down this time.

“Let’s try it again,” he said, and lifted his hand to summon the spare purple lightsaber—whose had it been?—to his palm before tossing it to Obi-Wan, who caught it handily. The younglings on the bleachers actually let out a cheer when Obi-Wan ignited his blades, and Anakin felt his chagrin in the Force even as he turned to give their audience a wink and a smile.

“Master Billaba’s apprentice seems to be a big fan of yours,” Anakin said, pitching his tone to idle needling. Reaching for this kind of banter had become a stretch in the last few months, but he could still get there if he tried. He kept his eyes on Obi-Wan as they fell into their ready stances.

Obi-Wan flipped the purple lightsaber around in his off hand before raising his primary blade high and holding the purple blade low in a modified form of the soresu opening. Some things didn’t change. “Misplaced hero worship.”

Anakin rolled his eyes, not saying that it was anything but misplaced, and Obi-Wan took the opportunity to rush him, his blades flashing as Anakin whirled to block them in turn. In another life they might have been practicing against Ahsoka. In another life he’d still be Obi-Wan’s apprentice and she’d be Plo Koon’s, and there’d be no war going on out there. In this life, he only had one chance not to destroy everyone and everything he cared about, and he wasn’t going to blow it again.

Mon Mothma took the frankly incredible news about as well as Bail had, which was to say, a little better than Padmé herself. Padmé could admit that Palpatine being a Sith Lord stung her pride as a Naboo and as the person who had elevated him to the Chancellorship more than a little. She was supposed to have excellent political judgment, and her insight had served her well in the past. Not this time.

“It has become increasingly clear,” Mon said quietly, “that Palpatine has become an enemy of democracy. He must be stopped. If the Chancellor is a Sith, as you say, then we are all in very grave danger.” The noonday sun glinted on her red-gold hair, currently confined by a silver filigree hairpiece. She had always reminded Padmé of Obi-Wan, mostly for the hair, which made sense: Mon was from Chandrila and Obi-Wan was from Stewjon, a Chandrilan colony world, though Obi-Wan didn’t know any more than that. He had apparently come to the Order as a very young child. “Even the most cursory study of history makes it clear that they are willing to do many things that the Jedi are not.”

“I agree,” Padmé said, “but my informants tell me that he is most likely not using his powers actively, or they would already have sensed his presence. They conjecture that most of his knowledge comes from spies, and surveillance.”

Mon’s eyes flickered slightly at the generic “my informants,” but she nodded slowly. “Then we are safe in here. For now.” She looked over at Padmé, who was sitting on the other end of the couch. “I know you want to restore the Republic, Padmé, but I am no longer so certain that we can simply go back to the way things were. Leaving aside the fact that the way things were was fundamentally flawed, we cannot simply rewind history, and our experiences of the war; they have made us who we are today. The same goes for the galaxy at large.”

“I concur,” Bail said quietly from his chair next to Mon. Padmé could remember herself, fourteen years ago, in a sitting room not too far from here: _It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions_. “At heart, the grievances of the Separatists were not without merit; we all agreed on that. We merely disagreed with their methods.”

“And now we know why Dooku was so quick to go to war,” Padmé said, not caring about the bitterness in her voice. “And who Mina Bonteri’s mysterious interlocutor was all those years ago.” Whether Mina’s ideals had ever been pure, she couldn’t know; but she did know that the Separatist Senator had paid for her choices with her life. With an effort, she put thoughts of her former friend and colleague aside and inhaled. Time to field test the conclusion she’d reached as dawn was breaking in her office this morning. “As to restoring the Republic…I do not think it can be done either, at least, not so simply. I think we need a new constitution.”

Bail and Mon stared at her. She’d surprised them, though both their worlds had been founders of the first Republic more than twenty-five thousand years ago. It shouldn’t have been such a radical idea to think that it was time for an updated version.

But her friends were anything but slow on the uptake. “A New Republic,” Mon said thoughtfully, tasting the name. “If it could be done—”

Bail was nodding. “A more equal government, that is fair to everyone—that would be worth fighting for.”

“And worth dying for?” Padmé asked, feeling the baby kick.

“If it comes to that, yes,” Bail said quietly. Beside him, Mon inhaled, and nodded slowly.

“I am no kind of warrior,” she said. “But I am committed to the cause of freedom and democracy, and in that cause I am prepared to give my life.”

Padmé blinked back sudden tears. She had made many mistakes in her life, but not in her friends and allies. “As am I,” she said. “And we three are not alone. If we keep true to our principles, the galaxy will never be the same.”

Three Senators in a Coruscant sitting room, in the midst of a galaxy in flames. Either they would go down in history as the founders of a new era, or they would die as traitors to Palpatine’s Empire.

Admittedly, there were some details in between that needed to be worked out first. “The problem, of course, is not only what that New Republic would look like, but how to bring it about,” Bail said slowly. “Historically, the government has been all but destroyed before the member worlds would consent to a new constitutional convention.”

“The emergency powers act gives the Supreme Chancellor a great deal of latitude in that regard, as we’ve learned,” Mon said. Her mouth tightened, indicating her unhappiness. “It may not be necessary to secure the consent of the member worlds for an initial convention. They would merely be free to participate, and free to ratify the resulting document.”

“Or free to secede,” Bail said, leaning forward. “We cannot compel member worlds to stay if they feel that it is no longer in their best interests to do so. If we try, we will be no better than Palpatine.”

“I agree,” Padmé said. She’d kept attending clandestine peace negotiations because she’d believed that peace was possible, and if Dooku had been deliberately frustrating them to prolong the war, that suggested that she’d been right. “We must make peace with the Separatists, and end the war. If we can create a worthy government, perhaps some of them will even be willing to rejoin us.”

“The problem is still how to begin that process,” Mon said after a beat. “Under the current statutes, almost all power resides with the Chancellor. And the Senators know it,” she added, repeating the gist of a remark she’d made in the open meeting earlier. “We can all stay in this institution, but we have precious little influence within it. And under an Empire, that would only decrease to the point of farce.”

“We can’t call for a vote of no confidence like you did fourteen years ago,” Bail said, glancing at Padmé. “Palpatine’s majority is far too strong.” That was an inescapable fact of the situation; her mission to Mon Cala months ago had been the last point at which she’d thought removing him from office via some kind of orthodox political maneuver might succeed. And Senator Dowmeia had been very blunt about her likelihood of success even then.

“The Queen would probably be forced to recall me, if we did call for a vote and it failed,” Padmé admitted. The Chancellor’s majority had become overwhelming upon the departure of the Separatist senators nearly four years ago, and the Delegation of 2000 had not made many inroads into his support among their colleagues. “Palpatine isn’t as popular as you’d think on Naboo, but he’d lose too much face if she let me stay in the position.” And that meant that Jar Jar would be Naboo’s Senator, at least temporarily, which didn’t bear thinking about. Padmé couldn’t deny that she had a soft spot for Jar Jar, but she’d never forgotten that it had been him who’d stood up and called for the emergency executive powers in her absence.

“I don’t imagine it would do much for my chances at re-election, either,” Mon said, with a glance at Bail, who shrugged. Padmé thought she might be overstating it; Chandrila had never had cause to complain of Mon as far as she knew. Alderaan was so old, its position and its wealth so unassailable, that its representatives had a huge degree of leeway in galactic politics; so far Bail had mostly used that leeway to provide humanitarian aid to various populations facing death in the war. But his standing in the Senate would certainly take a significant hit, leaving aside the fact that Palpatine wouldn’t forget their actions.

Padmé sipped her tea, savoring the inevitability of her next words. Until she said them, they weren’t real, and they couldn’t harm anyone. “The only option I see is that one of us will have to become the Chancellor.”

There was a short, tense silence. Padmé realized that she had successfully left Mon speechless, which she would have bet money wasn’t possible: but the Chandrilan’s mouth was hanging open in obvious shock. “You don’t mean assassination,” Bail said at last, staring at her. Something in his tone reminded her of the mistrust they’d had for her when she first came to Coruscant as a Senator, her reputation for working outside proper procedures having proceeded her. She’d worked hard to allay those fears, but perhaps they hadn’t been so misplaced after all.

Padmé shook her head. “The last thing I want is further bloodshed. But I know the Jedi are planning to fight him, and I wouldn’t bet against them.” At least, not if it was Obi-Wan and Anakin. Other Jedi, she didn’t know as well, but them, she did, and they were the best. She’d seen them together for herself. “That in and of itself could provide proof of his violating the Ruusan Reformation. And then once he is out of office…” It did seem like a tall order when she said it out loud. But she didn’t see that they really had any choice.

Bail looked even more unhappy than he had throughout the morning. The prospect of Jedi Knights killing the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, even if he were a Sith Lord, even if they did so in fair and open combat, wasn’t exactly thrilling in terms of legal or political precedent. “We can’t tell the Jedi about our plans; we don't know where they stand in all this. We might have four years ago, but not anymore.”

There was a warning looming in his expression; Padmé ignored it. “The Jedi aren’t any happier with the situation than we are.”

Mon’s normally serene features were twisted into open dismay. She was roughly Padmé’s age, but Padmé herself found it easy to forget that; the Chandrilan had been one of the youngest Senators ever, and she’d served for nearly a dozen years already. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she had acquired the cautious demeanor and serious mood to match that unenviable proximity to the Republic’s slow destruction. But then, Padmé herself hadn’t felt young since she’d first come to Coruscant on the wings of the Trade Federation’s occupation, even if, looking back, she could see that she’d still been practically a child. “The Jedi have changed too much for us to be able to assume that the Council will support us automatically, even if they have no love for the Chancellor.”

Padmé nodded; that much seemed self-evident. “In any case, ceding the government of the Republic to them is no kind of solution to our current quagmire.” Equally to the point, she would hear no end of it from Obi-Wan and Anakin if she did attempt to obtain their support in advance. Better to present whatever actions they took as a fait accompli.

Quarantining the Jedi Order from the government of the Republic had left them all but at the mercy of the Supreme Chancellor; at his behest, the Jedi had compromised their mandate, their principles, and their sovereignty in the name of the Republic. That had all been lies, as she knew now, and if that wasn’t bad enough, public opinion had started to turn against them for it. No one would accept the authority of the Jedi to rule, if they were so out of touch as to propose it, and anyone who paid attention to the political situation could have told them that. But the Jedi Council had focused almost maniacally on the war for the past year and more; Padmé was fairly certain that they didn’t realize how much their standing in the galaxy at large had changed.

It wasn’t her job to save them from the consequences of their decisions; she had her hands full with the consequences of her own. And she didn’t intend to run to them like a child in need of protection. If they were to be equal partners in a New Republic, they had to establish now that they could accomplish things without the aid of the Jedi.

Mon let out a breath. “Let us see what we can accomplish in the Senate without the Jedi,” she said, echoing Padmé’s thoughts nicely. “If they can expose him as a Sith lord, things will change. And we should be prepared to take advantage of it.”

That afternoon Obi-Wan paid a visit to the Jedi Archives. He hadn’t had many occasions to visit since the war had started—since he’d put the trigger to the war with the investigation that had started, and nearly failed, in the Archives—and superficially things seemed unchanged, until one noticed that the stacks were all but deserted and that Jocasta Nu, after more than fifteen years, was openly wearing her lightsaber at her waist again. Obi-Wan was forced to give her all of his security clearances as a councilor and a High General to get the full materials on the Lothal Temple, and some of them, Nu informed him, would take time to retrieve from their respective vaults. In the meantime, Obi-Wan sat down at one of the tables with the precis and began to read.

In the end there wasn’t much to go on. The Lothal Temple predated the Coruscant Temple and had been occupied, abandoned, and reoccupied by Jedi in at least three successive phases in its history, the last of which had ended a little more than a century ago. The mural of the Mortis deities had been noted since at least the second phase, long ago in the Middle Old Republic, and while there were cryptic references to the Temple standing at the crossroads of space and time, there were no specific references to the world between worlds beyond the mural.

After nearly an hour, Nu brought him a transcript of a holocron testament detailing a long-dead Master Eraqus’s pilgrimage to all the Jedi sites then extant. The description of the Lothal Temple was unusually clear:

> _…to the Lothal system I came, following the bidding of the Force. The Temple, in three parts, contains at its heart all of space and time. The worthy Jedi who pass the tests of faith and of perception may venture into that nexus and thence reach into any of the paths they wish to walk, forwards or backwards. But the Temple is canny: only those paths to which the Jedi themselves have a connection will reveal themselves in the portals of the nexus._
> 
> _To live without attachments is the way only of the Sith, who above all things desire power. It is our attachments, and how we bear them, that prove us Jedi in truth, for at any time we must be prepared to lay them down, and if need be our own lives, for the greater good of the galaxy and the Force._

Obi-Wan sat back in his chair. If his understanding of this testament was correct, it seemed that they could have, with more time, reached back into the past—or forward into the future—to alter events at will. Events that centered around people they cared about.

Even if he was wrong, he could never, ever tell Anakin; Obi-Wan didn’t have to ask who he’d want to save. Shmi Skywalker’s death had had little effect on the galaxy; it had been felt only by the people who loved her, first and foremost her son. But the mere existence of the possibility might tempt Anakin to intervene in more consequential events, and as for who Obi-Wan might have been tempted to save…so many events had flowed from the deaths of Qui-Gon and Satine that there was no conceivable way to alter the past to save them while preserving their own present. Nor did Obi-Wan have any idea to what point in their possible future they could have looked to unravel the threads of Palpatine’s plot.

But the idea of being able to save Satine from the fate that she hadn’t deserved was very, very tempting nonetheless. If he’d known it was possible while they were still in the world between worlds, he didn’t know what he would have done. Consciously choosing to let her go might have been beyond his capabilities.

Anakin didn’t believe it, but Obi-Wan understood his most selfish impulses far better than he wanted to admit. Nor did it truly seem so selfish to want to save those whose only crime had been to care for people on whose behalf they could be made to suffer by those of evil intent. Ignoring that suffering might have been the Jedi thing to do, according to Jedi like Yoda. But it was certainly not the right thing to do.

Dangerous thoughts, for dangerous times.

Eventually Obi-Wan got up to return the materials he’d looked at to the desk; his heart wasn’t in continuing any longer, though the old Master’s words about attachments lingered in his mind, and he intended to mediate on them whenever he next had the chance. But as he walked down the long corridors of the stacks he found his feet turning to a familiar place: the bust of the one-time Jedi Master Dooku, smiling down confidently on the Archives from his place of respect among the Lost Twenty.

Madam Nu found him there, still staring at the statue, a while later. “Is everything all right, Master Kenobi?” she asked, not bothering to hide her concern.

Obi-Wan resisted the automatic impulse to tell her that he was fine. Instead he said, “You should have this statue removed.”

The Chief Librarian raised an eyebrow. “Because Count Dooku is now the leader of the Separatists?”

“Because he left the Order under false pretenses,” Obi-Wan replied. “There was no philosophical difference; it was all lies. He was already what he is now: a lord of the Sith.”

Jocasta Nu had sat the Jedi Council once, but her term had ended well before the Battle of Naboo, back when Obi-Wan had still been a padawan—which hadn’t really been that long ago, especially for a Master who had trained a padawan to Knighthood and who now sat the Council himself. Three years ago, Anakin had been the youngest Knight in centuries; now he was merely one of the youngest to have survived.

“I’ll take that under advisement, Master Kenobi,” Madam Nu said, a little of her old prewar condescension filtering back into her tone. Like many of the surviving oldest masters, she had a tendency to underestimate him personally. Normally he didn’t find it bothersome, but his emotional equilibrium, such as it had been, had been shattered on Lothal. “But the point of the Lost Twenty is, or was not meant to be, that only the Jedi Order had a monopoly on truth, or on insight into the Force. Dooku’s path led him to the dark side, but that is not the inevitable end of leaving the Order.”

“Most Jedi would disagree,” Obi-Wan said mildly, but Madam Nu did not look impressed.

“Yes, I am aware of that old saw that goes around the Order about how leaving it means risking one’s soul,” she said, her tone edged with acid. “Like many Jedi superstitions, there is a grain of truth in it, but I have generated these reports repeatedly over the past year, Master Kenobi. Since the Ruusan Reformation, Jedi who have left the Order have not been any more likely to fall to the dark side than not, as far as we can ascertain from our records.”

It was Obi-Wan’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Is that really true?” Amongst younglings in particular, it was an article of faith that leaving the Order was a path to the dark side. He could remember worrying what fate waited for him if he didn’t find a master, before Qui-Gon had accepted him as his padawan.

Madam Nu let out a breath. “There is good reason to be cautious about leaving the Order, Master Kenobi, for obvious reasons, and in the old days of the Sith wars, things were obviously very different. But yes, I am certain that there is no clear trend in the evidence one way or another; what is clear is that leaving the Order is not obviously any riskier than staying in it, in terms of turning darksider. Which supports my point about the Lost Twenty, incidentally. The pursuit of knowledge may lead us to uncomfortable or even dangerous places. Such, I think, is the path that Count Dooku walked.”

Despite the Kamino incident, he had no reason to doubt the word of the Chief Librarian when she said that by the numbers staying in the Order was no more dangerous than leaving it. Certainly most of the notable Jedi who’d gone dark in recent years had done so within the Order: Quinlan, Barriss Offee, Pong Krell, Dooku… “Did you know him well?” Obi-Wan asked, finally turning away from the bust of their enemy to finish walking to the materials desk, Madam Nu keeping pace with him. He didn’t mention the fact that it had almost certainly been Dooku who had expunged any record of Kamino from the Archives, as no one else would have had both the opportunity and the motive; that would have been needlessly antagonistic.

There remained the outside possibility that it had been Sifo-Dyas, but Obi-Wan still wasn’t sure how much to trust Dooku’s protestations that Sifo-Dyas had helped him order the clones; he thought it more likely it had been the other way around. The man had clearly been a visionary, and a desperate one, but he hadn’t been so far gone that he would have collaborated in his own murder, or the cover-up of the entire affair that Dooku had orchestrated.

“I would have said I did,” Madam Nu replied. There was no mistaking the sadness in her tone; Dooku’s war had claimed almost all the Jedi her own age, her friends and companions since she’d been in the creche. “The war has proven otherwise, of course. But even if, as you say, he became a Sith before he formally renounced the Order, that does not sound unlike his way of dealing with things. He believed the Jedi had become far too conservative, even as a very young man. And he always thought that he was the smartest person in the room.”

There was no denying that the Count was a smug bastard. “That does sound like Dooku,” Obi-Wan admitted. “I used to think that the things he told me when we’ve met were all lies. But recently I have found myself wondering if instead they were meant as…clues.”

“If they are clues, it is because he has a plan for what will happen if you follow them,” she warned, looking at him over the top of her spectacles as she began scanning the materials back in. “He always had multiple angles on every situation.”

There was an old saw that you could tell what a Jedi’s master had been like by just counting up the opposite of whatever they did. It had become disturbingly literal in the case of Yoda and Dooku: the former was (or had been) the bulwark of the Jedi Order, while the other had become a Sith Lord devoted to destroying it. But in the case of Dooku and Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan could not make the distinction so easily. Qui-Gon had been a radical, yes, but in a very different vein than Dooku in the end, and not just because his taste in archaisms had run to ancient prophecies while Dooku had mastered an extinct form of lightsaber combat. Qui-Gon would never have condoned the war, let alone plotted to instigate it, and he would never, ever have turned to the dark side of the Force, no matter what the inducement laid before him. Of that, Obi-Wan was certain.

He could make the comparison easily between himself and Qui-Gon: the radical’s apprentice had so perfectly become a textbook Jedi, just as Yoda would have wanted, that he had been made a Master and given a Council seat in his mid-thirties, ridiculously young for any era in the past millennium. But the real truth was more complicated; if he had done all that, he had done so while constantly skating quite close to the edge of the Council’s disapproval, if not their active censure. Some of them, including Yoda, had never approved of his decision to train Anakin, and had expected both of them to wash out of the Order within a few years. He also knew that he would never have made Master if Anakin hadn’t made Knighthood, and that every survivor of First Geonosis who was even vaguely of appropriate age had been made Master within three months of the battle, as their survival had proven their skill not only in the Force but on the battlefield. It was the same reason Anakin had been allowed to take the trials at the nearly unheard-of age of nineteen.

And of course Anakin was far more of a radical than Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan could ever have hoped to be, simply by dint of being a Jedi, and himself.

The pain of Qui-Gon’s loss had faded with familiarity; Obi-Wan was used to his absence now, though it still cut at odd moments. But since Lothal he had found himself wondering whether he had tried, on whatever unconscious level, to be too much like Yoda for his own good, and for Anakin’s good; whether he had dismissed Qui-Gon’s example too readily. No one in the Order had thought that Dooku’s departure had reflected on Yoda, just as they hadn’t laid any of the blame for Dooku going Sith at his feet, since they’d assumed it had happened subsequently. But the truth was otherwise, and Qui-Gon had known Dooku very well indeed. Perhaps he had had the right of so many of their debates on Jedi praxis after all. Perhaps Yoda’s example was not quite so sterling.

“You should destroy that holocron transcript,” Obi-Wan told Madam Nu as she finished scanning the materials. “If it falls into the wrong hands, its potential danger is nearly limitless.”

Her mouth thinned. “You realize, Master Kenobi, that an archivist destroying the archives they are meant to safeguard is the opposite of everything we hold dear.”

“I do realize,” Obi-Wan said agreeably, leaning forward to rest his forearms on the counter. “But let me put it to you another way: given the choice between destroying the Archives and leaving them for the Sith to employ as they see fit, which better accords with your principles?”

“It has not yet come to that,” Madam Nu said, but she didn’t sound as confident as she might once have.

“No,” Obi-Wan agreed, straightening. “But if it does, it will do so almost before any of us have the chance to realize it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Caleb and Depa Billaba elements here are a riff on their storyline in _Star Wars: Kanan_ by Greg Weisman (2015-16). It's (deliberately) difficult to tell how long Caleb was actually Billaba's apprentice before she died in Order 66, but I've definitely rearranged the timeline to suit my own purposes. Bail and Breha Organa's backstory draws on _Leia: Princess of Alderaan_ by Claudia Gray (2017).
> 
> The Depa Billaba textual crux: in the prequels-era EU, Depa Billaba succumbed to the dark side on Haruun Kal and fell into a coma after dueling her master Mace Windu in _Shatterpoint_ by Matthew Stover (2003); she never regained consciousness, and Obi-Wan got her Council seat. _Rebels_ retconned her fate, and _Star Wars: Kanan_ changed the original story to her spending six months in a coma after a military disaster on Haruun Kal. The comic also states that she regained her Council seat…which is not actually possible given the Council's makeup in ROTS. Whoops.
> 
> Speaking of Matthew Stover, here and in other forthcoming chapters I have occasionally directly quoted or riffed on lines from the ROTS screenplay or from Stover's novelization of it. I have never actually read the book; I get my quotes from [the Twitter bot](https://twitter.com/rotsnovelbot).
> 
> I'm [on tumblr](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/), where you can check out [my tag for this AU](https://starlady38.tumblr.com/tagged/another-shot-at-life). I also put my playlist for this AU [on spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4my3R3mPZvPuH22MNbbHH9).


	7. Besieged

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Believe in yourself or no one else will.

The war looked a lot different when you were in it. After more than a month on Saleucami, General Quinlan Vos could say that definitively. He could also say quite a lot about the difficulties of commanding clone troopers in a battalion that was made up of the remnants of two previous units, of commanding clone troopers when you hadn’t been on the battlefield since the start of the war, and about the potential problems that Saleucami’s magma tubes, extinct volcanic formations, and desert terrain presented to trying to take the planet back from its Separatist occupiers. None of this he’d known two months ago: he’d spent the first three years of the war in the shadows as a spy, an agent provacateur, a saboteur and more. Eventually, the Council had asked him to add assassin to that list, which was when everything had started to go wrong for one Master Quinlan Vos, shadow Jedi.

Or, depending on your perspective, right.

But not because of the dark side. Because of her.

Some days, only the knowledge that Asajj had wanted him to live was enough to get him out of his camp bed in the morning, let alone take his lightsaber out from under his pillow and act like a Jedi, whatever that meant these days. Like a Jedi General who’d been sent into the field because there was literally no one else, despite the fact that he had no battlefield experience to speak of.

Another day on Saleucami that seemed like more of a half-hearted twilight to Quinlan’s Coruscant-raised eyes, which he saw through a haze of grogginess thanks to the planet’s twenty-six hour rotation period. Another morning of citrus-scented protein and carbohydrate mush, of not enough caf, and of a command meeting where his two senior clone officers, Captain Faie and Commander Doom, tried not very successfully to hide their dislike of one another and their distrust of him. None of it was enough to distract himself from the fact that he missed Asajj, an ache that had not lessened with time.

When he’d accepted the assignment Obi-Wan had advised him to be honest about the reasons he hadn’t yet taken the field in the war, and he had, up to a very limited point, but it hadn’t gone over well. Faie was a stickler for procedure, and he clearly took a dim notion of spying, though he just as clearly would never have said so explicitly to his Jedi General. Though Quinlan wasn’t an expert at reading clone microexpressions, Doom seemed better disposed to him, but he was the unit’s XO, not its senior clone commander. To make matters worse, Faie seemed to hold the fact that Doom’s previous Jedi Generals, Tiplar and Tiplee, had died on Doom’s watch against the other commander—to say nothing of the fact that his battalion had suffered more than fifty percent casualties, necessitating its amalgamation into Faie’s marginally less understrength unit.

Tiplar had been murdered before Quinlan had taken the Dooku assignment, and after he’d returned he hadn’t been surprised to hear that Tiplee was dead too. As Obi-Wan had said, it was almost to be expected; the sister Jedi Masters had been extraordinarily close in the Force. That sort of thing was part of the reason that it was extremely unusual for the Order to allow close relations to become Jedi, just as it was extremely rare for close relations to have sufficient Force sensitivity for it to even be a possibility at all. Tiplar and Tiplee, Depa Billaba and her sister Sar Labooda, and Adi Gallia and her cousin Stass Allie had been almost the only such Jedi in living memory—and all of them but Stass Allie and Depa Billaba were now dead.

There were days when, reading the after-action and casualty reports, Quinlan could only wonder how long it would be before he, Stass, Depa, and the rest of the Jedi joined them. It already seemed that the Jedi Order he’d known and loved, the one he’d grown up in and served wholeheartedly, was nothing more than a memory.

The one good thing about a siege was that it didn’t demand much strategic brilliance: he didn’t have to be Taron Malicos to perform competently. Quinlan listened to Faie and Doom and sometimes made suggestions for tactics, maneuvers, or positions based on his intuition; occasionally there was a clear opportunity to do some crazy Jedi thing, which was his primary role other than signing the requisition requests for the camp and the soldiers within it. But the Separatists, holed up in the underground base to which they’d retreated after the Republic’s capture of the capital Taleucema in the initial invasion, had proven a stubbornly hard nut to crack, or at least, their shield generator citadel had. Daily sorties aside, most of which Quinlan led as a matter of principle, their strategic position had been essentially unchanged for the past month. The clone corps of engineers had been called in three weeks ago, and they anticipated being able to blast the Separatists and their shield generators out within another couple of weeks.

So it was in the spirit of expecting some kind of relief to his tedium, other than risking his life on the field of battle for a Republic that increasingly seemed to no longer exist, that Quinlan heard from one of the clone perimeter scouts that a T-6 shuttle with Jedi Council ID codes had just made orbit.

“Copy that, Sergeant,” he said, looking up from his vambrace to take in the camp around them. “They say whether they want to land?”

_“Confirmed, General_ ,” the trooper told him. “ _I sent him over to landing field Cherek-0_.”

“Acknowledged. I’m on my way.”

As Quinlan turned towards the rear of the camp, he first heard and then saw the half-moon shaped shuttle, painted in the red and white color scheme of the GAR, passing overhead to come in to land at the designated spot, the body of the ship rotating around the central core to the horizontal position as it hovered. The sight of a T-6 brought back memories of more innocent days in the Jedi Order, but the military color scheme pointed right back to the present and the Order’s totally untenable situation.

The landing gear deployed and the shuttle came down in a perfect vertical touchdown, settling onto the field with a gentle puff of dust. As Quinlan approached, the ramp lowered and a single small cloaked figure appeared at the top of it, their presence in the Force unmistakable. He reached the foot of the ramp just as the Jedi Master came down it, and Quinlan was shocked to recognize Tera Sinube.

The old investigator stepped gingerly onto the soil of Saleucami, his two forelocks swaying gently in the slight breeze. He seemed sad somehow, but there was still the familiar irrepressible twinkle in his eye. “Greetings, young Quinlan,” the Cosian said, leaning on his sabercane. “It’s been too long. How goes your war?”

Quinlan swallowed several retorts that came to mind, reminding himself that he had the highest respect for the Cosian Jedi Master. Tholme had often praised Sinube’s skills as an investigator, and lamented the fact that he’d never been willing to undertake any shadow missions despite his clear aptitude for them. Even now his knowledge of the Coruscant underworld and the galactic crime syndicates that were linked to it was said to be second to none.

“Master Sinube, this is an unexpected pleasure. We are honored by your presence.” He gave the Cosian his best butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth smile, and Sinube actually chuckled.

“I’m sure I deserved that,” he said, smiling. “But in all honesty, I am glad to see you alive. Especially after your…absence.”

That was certainly one word for it. Belatedly, he wondered how much the Cosian knew about just what he’d been doing during his “absence:” it was his understanding that all of it was classified at the highest levels, but that didn’t mean that Sinube hadn’t figured it out for himself. Or that he couldn’t slice the Council’s encryption codes if he put his mind to it. “It’s good to see you too,” Quinlan said after a long beat of silence. “But what are you doing here?”

Sinube exhaled slowly, leaning on his sabercane as he surveyed the GAR encampment. At the opposite edge of the shield perimeter, the distant splashes of light from the Separatists’ desultory bombardment were just visible. In between, the tents that housed a full battalion of clone troopers and their support personnel filled the space for a good kilometer square. “I am here to tell you some very disturbing news indeed, young Quinlan,” he said at last, turning his head to look at him. The levity had melted away from his expression, and in the Force Quinlan sensed only grim determination. “Is there somewhere that we can talk privately?”

Anakin had been half-anticipating, half-dreading it since their return to Coruscant, and two days after they’d made planetfall, it arrived: a communique from Palpatine’s frankly creepy adjutant Sly Moore informing him that the Chancellor wanted to see him at his earliest convenience. Nothing made his skin crawl more than the knowledge that just a week ago he would have taken a speeder over to the Executive Office with no more thought than that, a lamb going happily to the slaughter.

His first impulse was to just bring Obi-Wan along; Palpatine didn’t like Obi-Wan, and it would annoy him, which realistically was about the best that Anakin could hope for at this point. To be totally honest he wanted little more than to just take the Sith Lord out, once and for all: if he was dead, he couldn’t continue destroying the Republic and the Jedi.

But that was the voice of the dark side, trying to seduce him down the easy path. Anakin had taken that path more times during the war than he cared to contemplate now, and it wasn’t a comfort to remember that even people like Mace Windu had walked along it with him at least part of the way. Leaving aside that it was a Sith thing to do, a Jedi Knight assassinating the Supreme Chancellor would not be a good look for the Order to say the least. Equally to the point, Anakin didn’t flatter himself that he could take down Sidious alone. It would be him and Obi-Wan together, or not at all.

All of this he had discussed in endless, circular detail with Obi-Wan during their trip back to Coruscant. He thought he could hold himself to what they’d agreed, if only because the price would be so stupefyingly high if he didn’t. But Obi-Wan had pointed out, rightly, that him accompanying Anakin would be out of the ordinary, and thus by definition might raise Sidious’s suspicions. That, they wanted to avoid at all costs.

Which meant that Anakin had to go alone, which delivered him right back to the fundamental problem: he was really, really bad at lying. It was part of the reason he and Obi-Wan had only rarely been sent on undercover missions before the war, and the war had only amplified what Obi-Wan delicately called his “straightforward” impulses. It was also part of the reason there weren’t many shadow Jedi ordinarily; most Jedi were incapable of hiding what they were for any length of time. Obi-Wan could, because Obi-Wan was the best of the Jedi, and also because one of his best friends was Quinlan Vos, Tholme’s student and the shadow Jedi’s shadow Jedi.

But now the shadow Jedi were all but extinct. Master Vos had been sent out to Saeleucami two months ago, openly leading a clone battalion like his former padawan Aayla Secura, who’d undertaken more than a few shadow missions in the old days, had done for most of the war. Between Tholme’s death two years ago and Vos’s turn as Admiral Enigma, the spy network Tholme and Vos had overseen, with shadow Jedi as its anchor points, was all but destroyed. Anakin had been present at Second Christophsis; Vos was proof that it was possible to turn back to the light side even after having walked into the dark. But he was also proof of the cost: Ventress’s life, and the light in Quinlan Vos's eyes. They’d done a few missions together when Anakin had been a padawan, and the Vos who had come back from Dathomir with Obi-Wan was a changed man.

He knew that he was trying to distract himself, and that it wasn’t working very well. “The most effective lies contain a good portion of truth,” Obi-Wan had told him. “Let him see what he expects: that you are worried about the people you care about and frustrated by the Order’s treatment of you. Those emotions are true enough that he won’t look any deeper, even if he could. We know that he can’t be using his powers actively during your meetings; if he were you would have sensed it long ago.”

_Easier said than done_ , Anakin thought. He was headed toward the Temple speeder bay; he’d already put off answering Palpatine’s summons for more than a day, using the excuse of the press of his duties to Sly Moore when she commed to ask him about his delay. Moore had made some not-too-veiled insinuations about clearing his schedule for him the last time he’d used the excuse to her, and Anakin didn’t want to cede the Chancellor’s office any more power over his life than they already had. He’d run out of options.

But not, ultimately, allies. There was a familiar domed metal figure waiting for him at the Senate Office Building speeder bay when he arrived, and Anakin felt himself smiling as soon as he heard the droid’s welcoming trill of whistles.

“It’s good to see you too, buddy,” he told Artoo, resting a hand on the top of the droid’s dome when he reached his friend. “Thanks for meeting me, I appreciate it.” Artoo trilled again, sounding worried, and Anakin winced. “Yeah, I know, I don’t like him either,” he said, lowering his voice as they stepped into the plushly carpeted corridors of the Office Building. Artoo let out a series of derisive hoots. “Well, yes, I did like him,” Anakin acknowledged, straightening his cloak and trying to walk a bit taller. These days everyone in the Office Building assumed that Jedi were there on war business, and if any Jedi looked less than completely calm the reactions ranged from concern to panic. “But then I learned some things.”

Artoo had some very definite opinions on not being privy to those things, which the droid was not shy about expressing. “Yes, I’ll tell you later,” Anakin reassured him. “But not here.”

The Red Guards standing sentinel outside the door to the Executive Office anteroom allowed him entry with barely any scrutiny, a level of access that Anakin had always enjoyed and which he had never seriously questioned. He could remember a few stray remarks from Obi-Wan wondering about it when he’d been a child, but he had subsided after Anakin had taken it poorly a few times, probably on the theory that he’d be better off picking his battles.

The guards did raise an eyebrow at Artoo, however. “This droid belong to you, General?” one of them asked, her tone none too friendly, and Anakin put a protective hand on top of Artoo’s dome.

“Yeah, he’s with me. Don’t worry, he’s on our side.” Though the helmets obscured their faces, Anakin could sense the Guards’ skepticism, but they waved him and Artoo through, Artoo beeping indignantly once the door slid shut behind them. “Yeah, they are paranoid,” Anakin said as they stepped into the vast anteroom. He folded his hands into his cloak, trying to channel Obi-Wan’s habitual unflappability. “But I’m sure it’s in their job description.”

The door to Palpatine’s inner office was shut; presumably there was some meeting going on that he was unwilling to have interrupted. Sly Moore had mentioned that a delegation from the Loyalist Committee was presenting another petition this afternoon.

Searching for a distraction from his nerves, Anakin found himself staring at the friezes in the anteroom depicting some of the famous battles of the Old Sith Wars, which he’d always found a little unnerving and now were just downright creepy. One of them depicted the Great Scourge of Malachor; the artist, whoever they were, had taken great care with the screams of horror on the faces of Jedi and Sith—but mostly Jedi—as they were left petrified.

He was still staring at the frieze, trying to make out the details on the great pyramid carved in low relief in the background, when the door to the inner office opened and a cavalcade of Senators and their retinues spilled out. Anakin half-turned, trying to see if anyone he knew was among them, and recognized Bail Organa towards the middle of the pack.

The Prince Consort of Alderaan caught his eye and smiled, the expression strikingly warm as Organa usually was, despite the politicians he surrounded himself with. There was a reason that Padmé liked him. For that matter, Anakin did too. “Skywalker! Good to see you,” he said, crossing the room to clasp Anakin’s right hand in the formal Alderaanian style. He had never made any remark about the prosthetic, unlike many other people. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, when the Supreme Chancellor calls, I come, Senator,” Anakin said, swallowing. He tried to keep his tone light, but he couldn’t help but wonder whether Organa had noticed something when his eyes narrowed slightly.

“I hadn’t realized you and General Kenobi had already returned from Mon Cala,” Organa said. “How was it?”

Anakin shrugged. “Same old, same old. We won, though.” The war wasn’t going to end quickly; that was something that he wasn’t sure that anyone on Coruscant actually understood, up to and including the Jedi Council. And it was for damn sure that he couldn’t explain what the war was like to someone who hadn’t been on the front lines lately, even if Organa had seen battle at First Christophsis three years ago.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said a new voice, and they both turned to see Supreme Chancellor Palpatine crossing the anteroom towards them. “Anakin, my boy, it’s good to see you.”

Palpatine didn’t look any different than the last time Anakin had seen him in person a few months before; he was wearing his usual dark red robes and he was smiling broadly, reaching out as if to put a hand on Anakin’s shoulder. Luckily, Anakin realized what was happening in time and he intercepted the Chancellor’s hand with his metal one, repeating the formal handclasp he’d shared with Organa.

Anakin had adopted the glove to avoid having the same conversation about his prosthetic limb with everyone he met, but sometimes he did wonder what his artificial sense of touch could convey if he weren’t. “And you, Your Excellency,” he said. Releasing the Chancellor’s hand, he let his own rest on top of Artoo’s dome before folding both of his hands back into his sleeves. The droid, as he’d asked, had taken up a position immediately to his right.

“Helloo, Ani. Good’en to see yousa!” a new voice sang. Anakin turned to see Representative Jar Jar Binks, still looking as incongruous as ever in his formal Senate garb, waving at him from the doorway.

“Hi, Jar Jar,” Anakin said, dredging up a smile.

Jar Jar turned his head, saw Palpatine, and visibly did a double take, his eyestalks rolling. “Oopsin da Chancellor! So sorry, Your Highness, sir.” He waved again at Anakin. “Mesa see’en you soon, Ani!”

Bail Organa glanced between them, showing no especial interest, then towards the door. “Chancellor, General Skywalker, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, tendering them both respectful half-bows. Anakin stifled the impulse to call him back as he turned away.

“It’s been too long, my boy,” Palpatine said, evidently giving Organa no more thought than that. He hadn’t acknowledged Jar Jar at all. ”I was delighted to hear of your victory at Mon Cala.”

“Yeah, I was pretty happy too,” Anakin said before he could stop himself. “Since it meant we didn’t die,” he added hastily when Palpatine glanced at him.

“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Anakin,” the Chancellor said, turning to lead the way back through the anteroom into the Executive Office proper. “I have every faith that you will survive the war. You’re too powerful a Jedi not to.”

Anakin hung back a few meters as Palpatine crossed over to the great window dominating the rear of the office. “I’m flattered, Your Excellency. But greater Jedi than me have died in this war. I don’t think any of us are safe.”

Palpatine turned back towards him. “My boy, we both know that there are no Jedi greater than you.”

At his side, Artoo beeped softly, and Anakin reminded himself to breathe. Even now, the words slotted into some empty space in his soul that he hadn’t noticed before—that Palpatine himself had probably excavated over the years. It was true that in terms of raw strength he was a match for anyone in the Order, and in his darker moments he wanted more respect for that. But what good was power if he couldn’t protect the people he loved? If it only led to the dark side and its lies? And respect needed to be earned, not compelled. “I don’t know how it looks from behind that desk, sir, but from where I’m standing, Obi-Wan is definitely a greater Jedi than I am.”

Was it his imagination, or did the Chancellor’s eyes flash, for just an instant, with something that might have been annoyance, or anger? “Master Kenobi is certainly a skilled warrior,” the Chancellor allowed. “Yet I fear he has come to rely too much on you.”

“Just as I rely on him. We’d both be dead a dozen times over if it weren’t for each other.” The droid next to him hooted indignantly. “And Artoo,” Anakin added.

“You two have been one of the Republic’s most powerful weapons,” Palpatine agreed, disregarding what he’d said about his loyal droid. “But the peak of your career lies ahead of you, does it not? You surely have the potential to surpass Master Kenobi, given his age.”

Obi-Wan was thirty-eight, not dead, but he didn’t want to give Palpatine any more ideas by saying so. “If I live that long, maybe,” Anakin said. “From what I’ve seen, even the best Jedi can fall with just one misstep.” That was how Oppo Rancisis had died, to name but the most recent notable casualty. “Our powers can’t protect us, or the people we—the people we care about.” He didn’t have to fake the hitch in his voice.

“Are you worried about Master Kenobi?” Palpatine asked, concern clear on his face. He looked so genuine, and the sense of his emotions that Anakin had in the Force felt the same: a bottomless well of sincerity. “You shouldn’t be. Despite what they say about him in the Senate, I have every confidence in him, and his ability to survive the war.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” Anakin agreed, looking down at his hands in his cloak. “But I do.” _Somebody has to._ He looked back up. “What do you mean, ‘what they say about him in the Senate’?”

“They say his mind has become fogged by the influence of a certain female Senator.” There might have been just a faint twist of anticipation in Palpatine’s expression, but it vanished before Anakin could even have been certain he’d seen it.

He knew where this was going, but he couldn’t think of a way to forestall it. “That’s ridiculous,” Anakin said, feeling his face settle into his accustomed scowl. “Who?”

Palpatine shrugged. “No one seems to know for sure, though everyone agrees that the Duchess of Mandalore’s death has left him…emotionally compromised. I have heard that this female Senator may be an old friend of his, possibly on the Loyalist Committee, but I cannot say for sure. Do you have any idea who it could be?”

_Yeah, my wife._ “That's impossible.” Anakin turned towards the Chancellor, who seemed ever so slightly smug to have this knowledge to hold over him. “I would know if something like that were going on.”

“Sometimes the closest are the ones who cannot see,” Palpatine said lightly, and Anakin took a deep breath, his hands clenching inside his cloak. He wanted to laugh hysterically, or strangle Palpatine, and neither was a good option right now, even though they both felt very, very right. “Idle Senate gossip is rarely true and never accurate,” the Chancellor continued. “I’m sure your old Master will be fine.”

“I’m sure that Obi-Wan will live up to your confidence in him, Your Excellency.” 

He had Palpatine’s attention now; he could feel the weight of his focus, even though there was still no hint of anything untoward in the Force, just that same sincere concern. The control he had to hide himself so totally was staggering. “Speaking of power…did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?” Palpatine’s tone was one of idle curiosity.

Plagueis wasn’t a name Anakin could remember hearing before, but it wasn’t like the Order knew of every Sith Lord that had ever existed; they had hidden themselves successfully for a millennium, while the Jedi had assumed that their enemies had died with Darth Bane. “No,” Anakin said, swallowing. He tapped a finger on Artoo’s dome as he forced himself to step forward to join Palpatine at the window.

“I thought not,” Palpatine said. “It's not a story the Jedi would tell you; it’s a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life… He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying.”

The Jedi taught that there was no death, only the Force, but if there was one thing he’d learned in the war, it was that the dead were still dead, even if whatever remained of them had joined the cosmic Force. Or whatever. “He could actually save people from death?” Anakin asked. Despite himself, he was intrigued, though it sounded like nonsense no matter which way you sliced it. Everyone died, as much as he didn’t want to think about it. He knew it was true; he just couldn’t imagine being able to accept it, like Obi-Wan did, or being unafraid of it, like Padmé.

“The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.” Palpatine glanced at him sidelong, and belatedly, Anakin wondered how he was supposed to be reacting to the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic knowing so much about the dark side when he supposedly wasn’t a Force-user.

Interested. He was supposed to be interested, but for personal, not professional reasons. Well, he was interested, but for both. “What happened to him?” Anakin asked, taking a step closer.

“He became so powerful that the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep.” Palpatine smiled, and Anakin felt the cold hand of knowledge lay itself upon his soul. He knew who that apprentice had been, and who he had become. “Plagueis never saw it coming. It's ironic: he could save others from death, but not himself.”

“Dying in his sleep, huh,” Anakin said, clasping his elbows in his sleeves and looking out over the cityscape. “That’s a lot better than most people get.” For a moment, the sunlight reflecting off the roof of 500 Republica seemed to shimmer, reminding him of the twin suns on Tatooine until he forced his mind away from the memories. “Especially Sith Lords. Or Jedi.”

“Anakin,” Palpatine said, weight on his name, and Anakin turned to meet his eyes. “I know the Jedi Council has excluded you from many of their secrets in the recent course of the war, including their decision to expel your padawan Ahsoka, and the real cause of the Duchess of Mandalore’s death.”

Anakin opened his mouth and then shut it again, torn between conflicting answers. He wasn’t the only Jedi the Council had lied to; he’d been privy to what had to be their biggest cover-up, the origins of the clone armies. But it was also undeniable that, if they did trust him as anything other than a blunt instrument, they hadn’t been doing a great job of showing it lately. “It’s true,” he said at last, hunching into his cloak. “They’ve definitely lied to me.”

“I am worried that they are lying to me too,” Palpatine said quietly, staring out the window towards the Jedi Temple, just visible in the distance. “Anakin, I've known you since you were a small boy. And I am asking you, as my friend and as a loyal servant of the Republic, if you see or hear anything…relevant…please don’t hesitate to come to me. The fate of the galaxy may depend on it.”

His mouth had gone dry; Anakin had to swallow twice before he could get the words out. “I can assure you that the Jedi are dedicated to the values of the Republic, sir,” he said hoarsely.

“Nevertheless, their actions will speak more loudly than their words,” Palpatine said. He sounded so reasonable; even now, there was a part of Anakin that insisted that his words just made _sense_. That the clear order of his rule was so much more preferable to the messy, complicated, unsatisfying reality of democracy. That the Jedi were planning to betray the one true champion of the Republic. “Anakin, I’m depending on you.”

When he’d left Tatooine nearly fifteen years ago, he’d never envisioned being a Jedi Knight would be anything like this. All he’d seen was the mind tricks and the laser swords and the path out of slavery. Anakin took a deep breath, reminding himself to focus on the here and now. “I’ll do everything I can,” he promised. It wasn’t even a lie; it just wasn’t the full truth, just like Obi-Wan had advised.

Palpatine smiled and actually reached out to clasp his shoulder, a touch that Anakin would normally only have allowed from Padmé, Obi-Wan, or another Jedi. This time, he endured it as the Chancellor smiled. “Thank you, Anakin. I know you won’t disappoint me.”

Anakin gave him a half-bow, letting the motion hide his face for a few crucial seconds. “I’m grateful for your confidence, sir,” he said when he straightened. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m due for a briefing at High Command shortly.”

Palpatine waved a hand as he turned to cross back towards the massive desk. “Yes, you have your duties, and I have mine. I’ll see you again soon, I’m sure.”

“Thank you, sir.” Anakin and Artoo turned back to the door, Artoo rolling ahead of him into the anteroom when Anakin’s steps slowed. “The power of Darth Plagueis, to save people from death,” Anakin said, turning to look back. “Is it possible to learn it?”

Seated at his desk, his hands spread wide on the arms of his throne-like chair, the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic looked almost sad. “Not from a Jedi.”

“Dooku did _what_?” Quinlan repeated. “And the Council has known about it for _how long_?”

Seated across from him on a camp stool, Tera Sinube looked as grim as he’d ever seen him. “The better part of a year, if I understand the timeline correctly,” he said. “Obi-Wan Kenobi discovered that the clones had been ordered by Master Sifo-Dyas on Kamino before the Geonosis massacre, as the Council told us. But after Master Plo Koon recovered Sifo-Dyas’s lightsaber more recently, further investigation revealed that a second Jedi had accompanied him to Kamino, along with an aide to former Chancellor Valorum. That aide died at Count Dooku’s hands before he could reveal what he knew of Sifo-Dyas’s fate, but the Council surmised that Dooku had been the second Jedi, the one who betrayed Sifo-Dyas to his death and the aide to more than a decade of imprisonment by the Pyke Syndicate. And they further assumed that the clones had been ordered for us not by Sifo-Dyas, but at the hands of the Sith.”

“I can’t keep this straight,” Quinlan said. He worked through Sinube’s words about Sifo-Dyas, discarded what he’d said about the Pykes, and came up with a grim conclusion. “So Dooku was a Sith before he left the Order?”

“It would appear that way—” Sinube began, but he cut himself off when Quinlan’s spike of pure rage rang through the Force between them. The temperature in the tent actually dropped a few degrees. “Quinlan, what—”

“Sorry,” Quinlan said through gritted teeth, breathing deeply as he forced his emotions back under control, clamping his shields down tightly. The tension in the Force didn’t slack, but it did lessen enough that the tip of Sinube’s tail stopped lashing. “I—I knew Dooku quite well once.” He didn’t mention that “once” had been three months ago; Sinube didn’t need to know that.

The Cosian eyed him, radiating suspicion in the Force, but didn’t pursue it. “As I was saying, the Council has apparently been lying to the rest of the Order in the hopes that they could end the war quickly and thus short-circuit the Sith plan, whatever it was.” Quinlan snorted, and Sinube nodded, his own opinion of that idea quite clear in the Force between them. “Indeed. But thanks to Kenobi and Skywalker having some kind of vision—I wasn’t given the details—they are now convinced that Supreme Chancellor Palpatine is the Sith Lord Darth Sidious, and that the Sith plan is to order the clone troopers to slaughter their Jedi generals when they are given a certain command.”

All of that suffering, all those deaths, all the bleak months of imprisonment, whether in Dooku’s cells on Serenno or within the prison of his own broken mind and soul—all that, and Obi-Wan and Skywalker had just found out who the Sith Lord was from a kriffing _vision_. Hell, they’d even managed to disprove the Council’s assumption that Dooku was the master, not the apprentice. The sheer bloody unfairness of it all was staggering. Skywalker really must be the Chosen One.

Jedi weren’t supposed to expect things to be fair. But Quinlan had proven that he wasn’t a very good Jedi. And it wasn’t Obi-Wan or Skywalker’s fault that the Council had sent him into the jaws of the beast on the basis of faulty intel; the Council had been working from their best knowledge at the time, just as he had on every op he’d ever run. “A certain command?” he repeated, taking another deep breath. “What kind of command?”

“The clones are apparently all equipped with some kind of bio-chip,” Sinube said, tapping his cranium with a claw. “When Palpatine gives them the ‘Order 66,’ the chips will activate and compel them to obey the order, which is to kill all Jedi as traitors to the Republic.”

There was silence in the tent for several long moments, the Force between them stiffening with tension once again. Sinube had activated a white noise/jamming device before they’d started talking, and they were both keeping a good chunk of their awareness on the camp around them in the Force, alert for any sign of eavesdroppers. Belatedly, it occurred to Quinlan that perhaps they should just have had this conversation on Sinube’s ship. But that might have looked suspicious.

“Son of a sarlacc,” he said at last. The idea that the Jedi could all just— _die_ —was like climbing a mountain: almost too big to contemplate at first. But he’d seen the numbers; somewhere around 85% of the Order was currently on deployment. And Jedi weren’t invincible; they just seemed that way. “And so you’re here to—”

“Tell every Jedi General in the field all of this,” Sinube finished. “The Council doesn’t trust this information to data chips or even encrypted communications; the possibility of surveillance is too great, which is to say, non-zero. The presumption is that if the Chancellor gets wind of our knowledge of his identity, he will immediately activate Order 66 and have the majority of the Order murdered at their posts.”

It was an extremely reasonable presumption, given everything they knew of the Sith. Hell, Quinlan would have told them as much if they’d asked for his assessment of the situation as a Sith Lord’s former apprentice. And the sad truth was that at this point many people in the galaxy believed that the Jedi were warmongers; few would feel much cause to doubt Palpatine’s claims that they were traitors, particularly if their deaths were already a fait accompli.

The entire plan had a certain baroque elegance to it: no matter which way the Sith Lord played his cards, he always came up winning. “So there’s no cure?” Quinlan asked. “For the clones?”

Sinube turned his palm up in the equivalent of a shrug. “There may be, but the Council has not had time to find it, if it exists. And they see no alternative but to continue fighting the war, even knowing as they do that it was designed as a trap to destroy the Jedi Order and that Palpatine and Dooku are working together.” He exhaled slowly. “There is a minority belief on the Council that informing the clones in advance of the existence of the chips, and of Order 66, may allow them to resist the compulsion if and when the order is actually given. But I have been explicitly instructed to tell you and every other Jedi General that the choice to inform your troops about this plot, and what other precautions you take to avoid being caught up in it, is entirely up to you.”

How like the Jedi High Council, to hand their field commanders a problem they didn’t know how to solve and say, “Good luck!” But Quinlan knew that was unfair even as he thought it; everyone on the Council was or had been a field commander themselves, and could be again. They shared the risk, even if they hadn’t initially shared the knowledge of their situation with those same field commanders.

That said, telling the clones the truth didn’t seem like all that great a plan. He couldn’t even imagine Faie not taking all of this extremely poorly. Doom…his deputy commander might, potentially, be a different story.

“By the Force,” he muttered, bringing his hand up to rub at his forehead. He could feel a headache coming on; it had already been a very long day, and reaching out to the Force was no help. “So that’s it, then? All of this—” He swept a hand around the tent, indicating the battlefield around them, this siege, the war. “—is a lie?”

“I am sorry that I have no better news to give you, Quinlan,” Sinube said, using his sabercane to lever himself off the stool. His genuine regret was clear in his face and in the Force. “And I cannot pretend to understand this war, or that I have any useful advice about how to fight it, particularly now that we understand its true purpose. I can only tell you what I myself have learned: trust only in the Force.”

Quinlan eyed him. He’d thought Sinube seemed sad earlier, and now it was unmistakable, the shadow of future grief suffusing his presence in the Force. It was grief for the Jedi Order, he thought, but also for the individual Jedi that he had to know he couldn’t save. And it was for himself, too; belatedly, he realized that Sinube was expecting to die on this mission.

The idea of trusting only in the Force was barely even comprehensible. Quinlan Vos had loved the Force; he’d loved being a Jedi, even a shadow Jedi: it was necessary, and he’d been very good at it. But he’d lost all of that when he’d fallen to the dark side, along with almost all of his sense of self; whatever was left of him had been with Asajj, and she’d given it back to him before her death. But the Force hadn’t guided him through those dark months; if the Force had willed his torture and near-total destruction, the deaths of his fellow Jedi at his own hands, he didn’t—couldn’t—understand it. If it was the will of the Force that the Jedi Order perish and the galaxy be delivered to an empire of darkness, he couldn’t believe in it.

He could, and did, still use the Force. But he no longer knew if he was its agent, or if he even believed that the Jedi Order served the Force at all. Perhaps they all had become servants of the dark side in one way or another.

He was out here now because he had nowhere else to go, because Asajj had told him to live. She’d also told him that he always had a choice to pick the right path, and that much he knew was true. But what the right path was, he had to rely on his friends, his fellow Jedi, to tell him; he no longer knew what it was for himself.

If she had lived, he’d have left the Jedi and their war behind in a Coruscant second. Instead, he was more than likely going to die for the Order on an Outer Rim backwater at the head of an army of slaves, fighting a war that was actually a farce designed to destroy them all and the galaxy along with them.

Quinlan swore again, letting his head drop into his hands. He felt Sinube watching him, projecting compassion and sympathy in the Force, and he let himself take comfort in it as he had when he’d been a padawan. He was glad to hear all this from a fellow Jedi, even if that Jedi was a recusant; things were always better with two of them.

One thing he’d learned recently was that despair and depression were extremely boring. Eventually, he let out a sigh and looked back up at Sinube. “Thank you for telling me this,” he said, and meant it. “How long can you stay?”

Sinube shook his head. “Long enough to eat a meal, if you can spare the rations. Then I must depart.”

The Jedi weren’t meant to be alone, though he’d operated solo often enough in his career that he was more used to it than not. Working with Asajj, an equal, had been a pleasure; he’d rarely felt anything like that since Aayla had been Knighted, though some of his missions with Obi-Wan had been that way. Quinlan wouldn’t have wanted anyone else out here with him if it meant they were condemned to share his fate. “Understood,” he said, and stood up from his own camp stool. “I’m pretty sure we can find you something.”

Anakin made it back to the Senate speeder bay on legs that felt numb, only the knowledge of what a Jedi Knight collapsing into the nearest ‘fresher looking like death would do to the Senate rumor mill keeping him upright through the halls. The sweat soaking his robes had turned cold and clammy; by the time he got back to his speeder, turned the ignition, and made it back to the Temple he felt chilled to the bone.

He had to put his head down on the instrument panel, breathing deeply to try to get his shaking body under control, once he powered down the engines in the Temple speeder bay. Behind him, he heard the sound of Artoo’s rocket engine depowering, then the droid rolling over towards him. “I’m okay, buddy,” he told the droid when Artoo beeped worriedly at him, but he knew his friend didn’t believe him. He didn’t really believe himself either.

After another few moments Anakin felt like he’d gotten enough oxygen to lift his head and depress the stud on his vambrace to com Obi-Wan, though he could feel himself still shaking slightly. _“Kenobi,”_ Obi-Wan said after the channel clicked on, and Anakin couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief. Sidious hadn’t killed Obi-Wan, and he hadn’t killed or turned _him_ , and that meant they still had a chance.

“It’s me,” Anakin said. “I’m back.”

He could feel Obi-Wan discarding his first few flippant responses; he must have sensed Anakin’s continued shakiness, or heard it in his voice. _“Good,”_ his partner said after a moment. _“Did Artoo get the recordings?”_

Anakin looked to his droid. “Did you hear that, buddy? Did you get them?” Artoo beeped in the affirmative to both questions, and Anakin raised his forearm so that he could talk into the pickup again. “He says he did.”

_“Good. Meet me in Master Windu’s chambers as soon as you can.”_

Anakin grimaced. “I’ll be there in a few minutes, I need to get out of these robes.”

He felt Obi-Wan’s spike of concern on the other end of their bond, but none of that made it into his voice. Anakin dreamed about that voice sometimes. Those were almost always extremely good dreams. _“Understood,”_ Obi-Wan said. _“Then we’ll meet you in my suite.”_

The trip back through the Temple corridors was more than a little weird, as it always was now. Anakin could remember the Temple being far more lively just a few years ago than it was these days, when it housed the Temple Guards, younglings, the odd padawan whose master had fallen to the war and left them behind, and the few remaining recusant Jedi, plus the healers, their patients, and whichever Councilors weren’t out on the battlefield that week. All told, they numbered somewhere in the middle hundreds, a shockingly low number for an Order that at its height had boasted nearly ten thousand Jedi in its ranks. Even before the war, they’d been running at much fewer than half that number.

Now it seemed possible that the Jedi Order might someday soon find itself extinct, even without the Sith murdering them all.

Not only was the Temple deserted, but the padawans and younglings tended to regard Anakin as though he were some sort of mythical being made flesh, while many of the Knights and Masters regarded him with poorly disguised wariness. Obi-Wan got some of the same reaction from both groups, particularly from the younglings; as far as they were concerned, he’d hung the moons of Iego. But the reactions of their fellow Jedi were wearisome, and more than a little insulting. Anakin was used to the skepticism of his seniors, though he didn’t like it, but it irritated him no end to see Obi-Wan exposed to that same doubt. After what he’d seen on Lothal, he could admit that some of the skepticism about him was warranted. But he’d told Palpatine the truth when he’d said that Obi-Wan was the best of the Jedi, and the thought that his peers didn’t recognize that was irksome, even if Obi-Wan didn’t mind being underestimated.

Once inside the suite he crossed the common room and opened the door to his old room, shrugging out of his cloak and pulling off his outer layers of tunic and shirts as he walked. All of them he left thrown haphazardly on the bed as he rooted through the drawers, looking for a clean shirt that still fit. Eventually he found an undershirt and shrugged it on, noting absently as he crossed back into the common room that it was a lighter color than he’d been wearing lately.

The door to the corridor slid open just as he finished doing up the collar ties on the V-neck, revealing Obi-Wan with Mace Windu standing behind him. The Master of the Order’s eyes flicked between Anakin, seated on the couch with Artoo stationed next to him, and Obi-Wan, who was looking at Anakin with open concern as he stepped into the room.

“Skywalker,” Windu said. Although he looked and sounded tired, the warmth in his voice was genuine. “I’m glad you made it back.”

“Me too,” Anakin admitted, grimacing. Meeting with the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic shouldn’t have been more dangerous than facing a Separatist army, and yet, somehow, it was.

“Obi-Wan says your droid recorded your conversation with Palpatine?” Windu asked, declining Obi-Wan’s offer of the room’s sole chair with a shake of his head. He stood with his arms crossed thoughtfully as Obi-Wan sat down next to Anakin on the couch, then paused to look at him, concerned.

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m fine,” Anakin protested automatically.

Obi-Wan ignored him. “Stay here, I’ll get you a blanket. Don’t argue,” he added as he went into his own room, not even looking back at Anakin, who rolled his eyes.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He didn’t object when Obi-Wan came back with the promised blanket—Obi-Wan had told him once that it had been Qui-Gon’s—and draped it over his shoulders like he had when he’d been a child, sitting back down next to him close enough that their thighs were practically touching. “Artoo did record everything,” he told Windu, who had observed all this in silence.

The three of them turned to stare at Artoo, who beeped and began projecting the recording he’d made of Anakin’s conversation with Palpatine. Looking at himself, Anakin thought he hadn’t screwed up for once. He looked upset and unhappy by turns, but that was no more than what Palpatine would have anticipated, and the suspicion on his face during the story about Darth Plagueis was no more than was warranted.

“You did well, Skywalker,” Windu said quietly when it was over, and Anakin blinked: he hadn’t been expecting to hear anything like that.

“Thank you, Master Windu,” he said, and felt Obi-Wan drop a hand to his knee, squeezing it in reassurance. It felt good; Obi-Wan touching him always felt good.

But now was not the time to think about that. “Have you ever heard of this Darth Plagueis?” Windu asked Obi-Wan, who shook his head.

“Not that I can recall,” he said. “We’d have to ask Madam Nu to run a full search of the Archives, but I read as much of the records on the Sith as I could after the Battle of Naboo. If there is a mention of Darth Plagueis in the Archives, it’s in records that were beyond my security clearance at the time.”

Windu sighed. “We most likely should ask her, but I admit I’m doubtful that she’ll find anything. There is still much about the Sith that we don’t know.”

“‘If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist,’” Obi-Wan murmured, a trace of humor passing through his expression.

Windu was too disciplined to roll his eyes, but he did look sardonic. “If only that were so.”

“Plagueis was his master,” Anakin said, and both the Councilors turned to look at him. Under their questioning gazes, he elaborated, “Palpatine’s, I mean. Sidious’s. Didn’t you feel it? He trained under him in the ways of the dark side, and then he killed him. Plagueis won’t be in the Archives.”

“A distinct possibility,” Obi-Wan agreed, his expression unhappy.

Windu was evidently lost in thought. “Unfortunately this isn’t enough evidence to take to the Senate,” he said at last. “It’s certainly suggestive that he knows stories about Sith Lords whom we Jedi have never heard of, but it’s no more than he could have learned as a collector of Sith artifacts.”

“Even if it we did obtain incontrovertible proof that he is a Sith Lord, I doubt that it would be sufficient to sway Palpatine’s majority,” Obi-Wan said. When Windu glanced at him, he grimaced. Neither of them liked politics, though Obi-Wan understood it better than he let on. Certainly better than Anakin ever had, despite Padmé’s efforts. “It has only grown over the course of the war, and the Senators who oppose him have lost influence correspondingly. We can’t expect a political solution to the problem he presents when he has suborned our politics and institutions to his will.”

“Was he telling the truth?” Anakin asked abruptly. “About the midichlorians, and immortality?” The two Jedi Masters glanced at each other, but neither of them said anything. “Obi-Wan, damn it, give me an answer!” Anakin said, turning to his best friend. “Is it possible, or not?” Obi-Wan shook his head, looking away towards Windu, but it wasn’t denial.

It was Windu who answered. “Palpatine was telling the truth when he said that the dark side is a gateway to unnatural powers,” he said slowly. “Skywalker, you remember the stories you heard as a padawan—the Sith and the Jedi of old could do things that now seem almost mythical to us. Certainly some of the Sith Lords during the wars are said to have had unnaturally long lifespans, but it’s also true that Force users in general tend to live somewhat longer than the general population, provided they aren’t killed first.”

“So it could be true,” Anakin said, looking between them.

Obi-Wan sighed. “It could be,” he said reluctantly. “But consider the source, Anakin—Palpatine wants you for his Sith apprentice. He’d say anything to get you to turn to the dark side, and we know that the Sith are liars. Although we have already seen evidence that the hatred and rage of the dark side can cheat death,” he added, his expression darkening. Anakin knew that he was thinking about a certain former Sith Lord whom he’d personally sliced in half. “But that immortality of the body, such as it is, comes at too high a cost.”

Windu looked troubled. “If immortality is possible, it could be so within the Force,” he said slowly. “Another meaning to what we teach about death, potentially.”

“Master Windu, you can’t mean—” Obi-Wan began, but Windu cut him off.

“Can’t I?” he asked. “What if Yoda was telling the truth? What if it really was Qui-Gon Jinn speaking to him, and not just a delusion borne of stress?” He glanced at Anakin, who had of course been instrumental in enabling the Grand Master to go on his jaunt to wherever he’d gone. Anakin had believed Yoda when he’d said that he’d talked to Qui-Gon, and he still did. He just wished that Qui-Gon would speak to _him_. “Yoda said when he returned that he had found a way to achieve victory for all time, not just in the Clone Wars. What if he meant—”

“Immortality in the Force?” Obi-Wan asked, incredulous. “ _That_ is his strategy for countering the Sith plot to murder the Jedi?” His voice rose on the last words, and Anakin automatically reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, trying to give him some of the reassurance he normally provided. Master Qui-Gon had become a bit of a fraught subject after Yoda’s experience and Maul’s apparent resurrection.

“It’s possible,” Windu said, as grim as Anakin had ever seen him. “Perhaps even probable.”

Anakin felt the Force flex around Obi-Wan as his frustration, bubbling ever higher these days, briefly reached the boiling point. There was anger in it too, biting and unmistakable. “Obi-Wan—” he said, repressing the urge to glance at Windu.

“Don’t tell me to settle down, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said sharply, but he made no move to shrug off Anakin’s hand. “The Jedi are my family—the Order is everything I have. I cannot believe that Yoda would just accept the deaths of everyone in the Order as the price to pay for the probable defeat of the Sith. _Eventually_.”

This time Anakin did glance at Windu, whose expression was equally unhappy, even if his emotions weren’t leaking into the Force. “Don’t look at me like that, Skywalker,” Windu told him, sounding irritated. “I am not Yoda, and I don’t agree with him about everything. Certainly not about this.”

“Right,” Anakin muttered, looking back to Obi-Wan. “Sorry.” Obi-Wan was strong in the Force, and his roiling emotions at the other end of the bond were going to give Anakin a headache if he didn’t get himself back under control soon. He squeezed his partner’s shoulder still tighter, saying his name, and some of the blankness in his eyes lifted as Obi-Wan inhaled, the pressure in the Force fading as he got his emotions back under control.

“Thanks,” Obi-Wan murmured. He leaned forward a little, clasping his hands between his knees, but he made no move to dislodge Anakin’s hand.

“Don’t mention it.”

“I agree that this is a disturbing decision on Yoda’s part, if it is indeed the course of action he has decided on,” Windu continued, looking at Obi-Wan. “Without the Jedi Order the galaxy will fall into darkness. We don’t have the right to choose that fate for everyone else, even if we wanted it for ourselves.”

“Artoo,” Anakin said, and the droid’s domed head swiveled toward him. The droid had refused to answer before, but it was worth asking again. “Where did you and Master Yoda go?” Artoo’s dome rotated slowly, studying them; when he beeped, he sounded just as grim as Windu, and Anakin frowned. “Korriban?” he repeated. Beside him, Obi-Wan stiffened, tension suffusing the Force around him, and Windu’s expression flattened still further. “What’s Korriban?” he asked the two Masters.

“You would know it as Moraband,” Obi-Wan told him quietly. “The ancient planet of the Sith, where they interred their dead in monumental tombs and sacrificed Jedi to the dark side of the Force.”

Just the spot for the Grand Master of the Jedi Order to choose as his vacation destination. Anakin was still thinking how to ask if the Sith planet could have affected Yoda’s mind when Obi-Wan looked to the astromech. “Did Yoda tell you what he saw there, Artoo?”

The droid hooted a negative, and there was silence in the room for a few minutes. Anakin remembered the vision of Sidious and Vader they’d had on Lothal, Vader’s malice and the strange fire Sidious had turned on them. Despite the blanket, he felt chilled again.

Eventually, Windu uncrossed his arms and looked at Anakin, who let go of Obi-Wan and sat up straighter. “You did well today, Skywalker,” he repeated. “But Palpatine will expect you to have something for him on us eventually.”

“Yeah, I’m not exactly happy about that.” Anakin took a breath. “Are you going to—ask me to spy on him or something?” He didn’t relish the idea; he knew he wouldn’t be any good at it.

But Windu shook his head. “We already suspect a plot to destroy the Jedi. Besides, whatever you could learn isn’t worth the risk that you might inadvertently give away our suspicions about him. Or the risk to you.”

“Thanks,” Anakin said. “I think.” Beside him, Obi-Wan stirred, but didn’t say anything.

Windu looked between the two of them, and Anakin spared a moment to wonder what he saw, aside from the fact that they were sitting too close together. “You two are still Jedi, and the best we’ve got,” he said at last. “And as long as I am Master of this Order, you will have a place in it.” He shifted his stance, turning towards the door. “I’ll speak with Madam Nu about Darth Plagueis. Get some rest, both of you. I have a feeling you’re going to need it.”

The door closed behind him, leaving Anakin to wonder whether Mace Windu had just, in his own inscrutable way, told him that he should totally try to sleep with his best friend and former master. Which reminded him of something he’d meant to say earlier.

“The Order isn’t all you have,” he told Obi-Wan, shifting on the couch so that he could face him a little better. “You’ve got me, and Padmé, and Ahso—other people. We’ll never abandon you, no matter what the Order or the Council does.”

Obi-Wan actually smiled at him, though the expression, and his presence in the Force, was tinged with sadness for some reason. “I could say the same to you,” he said. “Anakin, you must understand—anyone you would give your soul to the dark side to save would never want you to pay that price in the first place. And even if they lived, you would lose them, just as you would be lost to them. It’s not worth it, even if it were possible.”

Anakin’s eyes prickled with sudden tears. “I know,” he said, his voice gone hoarse. “I just wish—” That he could make sure they were all safe. That he would never fail anyone again the way he’d failed his mother. That being the Chosen One, if he really was the Chosen One, could actually mean something worthwhile to the people he cared about, not just cause them all more suffering and pain.

Frustrated with himself, he raised his organic hand, swiping at the moisture. He could almost hear the platitudes that Obi-Wan might once have uttered going unsaid between them. “I know,” Obi-Wan told him instead; when Anakin looked up, he reached out and pulled him into a hug. Anakin returned the embrace, taking comfort in Obi-Wan’s solid warmth. He already felt a little less lost, and more found.

Master Sinube proved to be an unexpected hit in the GAR encampment’s mess tent. The investigator’s dry sense of humor meshed well with the clones’ propensity for dark jokes, and when he began telling stories about his days tracking down criminals in the Coruscant underworld they were all ears. Quinlan mostly listened, adding sardonic comments at a few points but content to let Sinube’s deference to him as the commanding officer boost his stock with his troops. He didn’t blame them for their suspicion; no one ever really liked a spook, and he could sympathize with their skepticism of him as a green field commander nearly four years into the war. But he wasn’t above letting the Cosian Jedi Master make him look good while on his ostensible “inspection tour.”

When the meal was over, Quinlan accompanied Sinube back to his shuttle, still parked on the landing strip. “They’re good men,” Sinube said as they walked, and Quinlan blinked. “I haven’t had much contact with clones before this; I’m glad I got the chance to know some of them.”

Quinlan’s throat tightened. “They are good people,” he agreed when he could speak again. “They don’t—they don’t deserve what they’ve gotten.” _They deserve a choice about whether to fight_ , he thought.

“You like them,” Sinube observed.

“I do,” Quinlan said, trying to keep his tone neutral. The personhood of the clones was a matter of some debate in the Jedi Order, or at least it had been at the beginning of the war before the imperatives of survival had trumped the niceties of philosophical discussion. As a shadow Jedi, it had all been academic to Quinlan until now.

“No one deserves to be enslaved,” Sinube agreed. “Just as we Jedi ought not be slavers.” The Jedi had fought wars to end slavery throughout their history; although they had never fully succeeded, that legacy too was already destroyed in the name of the Republic.

They reached the edge of the landing strip, and Sinube keyed the ramp deployment sequence for his ship on the comlink that he withdrew from his belt. As the ramp lowered behind him, he turned back to Quinlan.

“Thank you, Master Vos,” he said formally. “It was good to see you again.”

“I should say the same to you, Master Sinube,” Quinlan told him. He hesitated, trying to think what else to say, but Sinube beat him to it.

“Quinlan,” he said quietly. “I know that you have the skills to survive, no matter what happens. If you will accept an old Jedi’s final request—don’t let all these deaths have been in vain. Don’t let this be the last of the Jedi.”

It was a far more difficult charge than the one Asajj had laid on him, in its way, and some part of Quinlan—the part that had heeded the temptations of the dark side, the part that was weak and fallible—quailed at it. But that was the part of himself that he would die before heeding again, so he took a breath and raised his head and nodded at Sinube. “I won’t let that happen, Master. And—may the Force be with you.”

“And with you, Quinlan,” Sinube told him, smiling slightly, giving him a nod and his old cheerful wave as though they weren’t standing at the edge of the end of everything. And, just perhaps, the beginning of something as well.

The Cosian turned towards the shuttle, and Quinlan stayed to watch him go. He lifted a hand in farewell when Sinube’s ship rose into the air on its repulsor engines, its landing gear retracting as it hovered. He could just make out Sinube raising his own clawed hand in acknowledgement, and then the shuttle dipped its wings in salute before it banked into the air and sprang for space.

Left behind on the ground of Saleucami, Quinlan Vos sighed, wishing he’d worn his cloak: the chill of the desert night crept up swiftly. Maybe tonight was the night to see whether the clones were willing to cut him into their unauthorized liquor supply. Maybe Sidious would transmit Order 66 while he was asleep and he’d be murdered in his bed. Maybe none of them deserved to be out here fighting and dying in the name of a farce.

Maybe, if he still wanted to call himself a Jedi, he should start acting like it and do something about that.


	8. Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Friendship shows us who we really are.

A week or two after the trip to Level 001, Ahsoka was eating a very late dinner in Dex’s when the Besalisk came out from behind the counter to sit in the booth across from her. She didn’t need the Force to sense his scrutiny, though the concern she felt behind it would have been a little harder to detect. Resolving not to be the one to talk first, Ahsoka kept eating her soup methodically. The food was genuinely good, though after years of eating little but military-issue rations just about anything would have tasted amazing.

Dex grunted when she finished the stew, letting her spoon clatter back into the bowl. “How you doing, Ahsoka?”

“I’ve been okay,” Ahsoka replied, sipping her drink. She’d originally heard about Dex from Obi-Wan, and she had a shrewd notion that he was keeping tabs on her for the Jedi Master. She didn’t mind, precisely, but she wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to know it for certain, either. “I could always use more work, though, if that’s what you want to talk to me about.”

Dex grunted again. Two of his hands rested on the table, while he crossed his other two arms over his ample chest. She’d never met Pong Krell, but she’d heard Anakin’s rant, and wormed chunks of a very terrible story out of Rex. When she’d first met Dex she’d been unable to shake thoughts of the fallen Jedi Master, even though the two Besalisks were as different as it was possible to be; she hadn’t encountered very many of their species. “Work, huh…not precisely. I have a message for you from our mutual friend. You know, the ginger general.”

So much for the comfort of ambiguity. But more than that, she felt again that cold thrill that told her that time was running out. Secrets were being revealed, veils rent asunder. Where it was leading, she didn’t know, but she didn’t think she was going to like it. “Right,” Ahsoka said, putting her hands on the table. “What’s the message?”

“Says he wants to meet with you,” Dex told her. “Apparently he needs your help.”

Ahsoka bit her lip, struggling with a surge of irrational anger and the more pragmatic temptation to attempt to impose conditions, such as her lightsabers. But Obi-Wan Kenobi wasn’t called the Negotiator for nothing, and she didn’t want to seem…hostile. Her decision wasn’t his fault, and she knew that he’d argued for her against the Council’s actions every step of the way. Even if she selfishly wanted him to have done more for her—though what more, she could admit to herself that she didn’t know. “All right,” she said, letting out a breath. “Tell him the Sleeping Rose, incognito. He can name the time.”

“I’ll do that.” Dex was still studying her, his concern evidently having deepened. “You sure you want to get involved with all that again, Ahsoka? I can tell him you said no. And you can still eat here for free, for as long as you like.”

Ahsoka hesitated: a part of her was tempted by the offer. She’d tried to leave “all that” behind, and for a few months she’d even mostly succeeded. But she would have to renounce the Force itself to escape the war, and even then, she thought that the only sure way to see its end was death. And if she were honest with herself, since her exploits with Sinube and the younglings she’d caught herself wondering about whether, perhaps, she might one day want to go back to the Order. Ahsoka let out a breath, and gave the Besalisk a rueful smile. “Thank you, Dex. But it’s really all right. They’re still my friends”—she thought they were still her friends—“and if I can help them, I will.”

Her own words were ringing in her ears two days later as she made her way to the dive bar she’d named, wondering whether Obi-Wan had heeded her warning about going incognito. She didn’t worry about it for herself: wearing a generic jumpsuit, without her lightsabers and padawan beads, she didn’t look much like a Jedi anymore. Even before she’d left, she hadn’t looked much like the common image of a Jedi; she’d adopted an aggressively functional costume even before she’d gone to Christophsis, modeled on Aayla Secura’s typical outfit. Not that anyone in the Order had ever asked about her decision to eschew the traditional robes.

She spared a thought, as she headed through the door, to hope that the Twi’lek Jedi General was still alive. She hadn’t heard that she wasn’t, but with the way the war was going—and the way the Supreme Chancellor’s office was clearly editing the news for its own purposes—that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

Ahsoka shoved her way through the crowd to the bar, summoning a thread of the Force to emanate a distinct sense of _get away_ which most sentients would perceive subconsciously. The bartender served her Festian mezcal on the rocks without complaint, and she took the drink with her on the way to one of the tables in the back with a view of the entrance. Deliberately, she’d arrived a good half an hour before their scheduled rendezvous.

If she hadn’t had the Force, she would never have known when Obi-Wan Kenobi walked in the door. Frowning, she eventually placed the bearded Kiffar Guardian—no, not a full Guardian, he didn’t have the insignia, though he was wearing the sleeveless black leather armor—who was ordering something bright blue and high-proof at the bar as her former master’s master. He was carrying a small black leather satchel high under his left arm; idly, she wondered whether it contained his lightsaber. He had a large, well-used blaster strapped to each thigh, but there was no place in his current getup to hide a Jedi’s weapon.

She sipped her drink and waited a few minutes; eventually the air in the seat across from her rippled and Obi-Wan appeared, looking even more tired than she remembered. “Ahsoka,” he said, sparing her the trouble of wondering what she should say. “I’m very glad to see you alive.”

“You too, Master,” Ahsoka told him, not hiding her concern. “Though you look like hell, to tell you the truth.” She’d thought seeing him again would be awkward, but if anything, she found herself fighting the sense that no time had passed, that one of them was just reporting in from some secret mission for the Council.

He smiled faintly. “You should see the other guys.” It was a clone joke, and the humor in his expression faded quickly. “Ahsoka, I am sorry to disturb you,” Obi-Wan said, with the faint formality of someone who had rehearsed what they were about to say. “I am not—asking you to reconsider your choice. But right now Anakin and I need the help of someone outside the Order, and to put it plainly, you are the only person that we trust.”

 _Not Padmé?_ Ahsoka wondered, but a Galactic Senator wasn’t a field operative regardless of trustworthiness. His words inspired a wave of warm feelings, and she took a breath, fighting to keep her head. There were reasons she’d left, and those reasons were good ones. “If I can help, Master, I will. But on two conditions.” Obi-Wan nodded expectantly, and she took another breath. “I need to get paid. And I want my lightsabers.”

Obi-Wan nodded again. Was that approval she sensed? The Kiffar tattoos rendered him even more inscrutable than usual; she didn’t know him quite as well as Anakin did, just better than anyone else besides Anakin. “Both are eminently acceptable.” He glanced around, then produced a small transponder which Ahsoka recognized as a top of the line white noise/jamming device. It would remix and retransmit the ambient noise around them while blocking their conversation from being intercepted. Setting the device on the table, Obi-Wan depressed the stud at the top and waited until the indicator light shone a steady green before he continued.

“I have your lightsabers with me,” he said; “I thought you’d want them back, regardless. As for the job…” He hesitated. “Are you sure, Ahsoka? What we’re going to do is very dangerous.”

Ahsoka bit back an automatic retort about how she wasn’t afraid of danger. She’d proven that time and time again in the war, and he knew it as well as she did. Instead, she tried to hear the concern behind his words in the spirit that he meant it. “Obi-Wan,” she said, using his name for the first time, “whatever it is, I’m ready for it. And to tell you the truth, at this point knowing more about the looming disaster would probably make me feel better, not worse.”

He sighed. “So you’ve sensed it too.” He knocked back the rest of his drink, then set the glass on the table, toying with it slightly. In the Force, she could sense him steeling himself, and couldn’t’ help a pang of trepidation as to whatever it was: obviously he wasn’t wild to share his news. But after another beat, he inhaled and met her eyes.

“A week or so ago Anakin and I had…a vision,” he said slowly. In the Force, Ahsoka got a bare sense of an echoing blackness, wonder and horror laced with the inimical cold of the dark side. Whatever the vision was, it had come at a cost. “I won’t tell you how, but we obtained information which strongly indicates that the Supreme Chancellor is the Sith Lord, and that he is plotting against the Jedi Order.”

Ahsoka opened her mouth and shut it again, remembering the malice she’d felt from Palpatine during her trial. It should have been shocking, and on one level it was—the control he must have for none of the Jedi to have ever sensed the dark side from him was literally astounding—but when she searched her feelings, she wasn’t very surprised. It explained a lot when she actually thought about it, starting with the fact that the Chancellor’s office was always such a font of new intelligence on the Separatists. And his weird taste in art. “How long?” she asked instead. “And what do you mean, plotting?”

Obi-Wan’s shoulders hunched slightly; he wasn’t happy about what he was saying. “A few months after you left, Anakin and I were sent to Oba Diah to question the Pyke Syndicate about Master Sifo-Dyas and the origins of the clone army. There we learned that Darth Tyranus, aka Count Dooku, arranged for Master Sifo-Dyas to be murdered all those years ago. We learned last week that the clones have some kind of trigger mechanism installed which, when the Supreme Chancellor gives the order, will compel them to turn on and kill all the Jedi in the field.”

Though Master Sifo-Dyas was only a name to her, she remembered what they’d all been told about the existence of the army after First Geonosis. No one except the recusants had ever questioned that millions of clones had simply been waiting on Kamino for Obi-Wan to discover them. “But the clones were ordered before Dooku left the Order,” Ahsoka said, stunned. _This_ was the part that was shocking: Dooku was one of the Lost Twenty, Yoda’s last apprentice. “So if that’s true—”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said grimly. “He turned to the dark side while still a Jedi Master, and he left the Order to fulfill his and Palpatine’s plot to destroy the Jedi and the Republic. And to take Maul’s place at Sidious’ side.”

Weirdly, what came to Ahsoka’s mind was Lux Bonteri and his mother Mina, Saw Gerrera and his sister Steela. They’d fought and died on Onderon for what they saw as—and what were, she could admit now that she was no longer an officer of the Republic—legitimate grievances against the galactic government. The entire time she’d been a youngling, Count Dooku had been inspiring thousands of systems to his banner in the name of that same cause.

And it had all been a lie, from start to finish. Dooku hadn’t cared about the Separatists then, and he clearly didn’t care now; he’d sabotaged all those peace efforts personally and made all those incomprehensible strategic decisions for a reason. The Confederacy was simply another weapon against the Republic and the Jedi.

“How do we stop them?” Ahsoka asked, meeting Obi-Wan’s eyes. She wasn’t a Jedi anymore, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want the Order to survive. And from the feelings she’d been gleaning from the Force of late, she had a shrewd idea that the impending cataclysm would sweep her up in it regardless of the niceties of her institutional affiliation.

He let out a breath, his expression clearing somewhat. There was obviously more to the vision story than he’d told her, but she didn’t press the question; she had a very poor track record at trying to get him to open up to her. “First, I need you to find an underworld neurosurgeon. We have surmised from an incident last year that the control mechanism must be in the clones’ brains, but we can’t trust any Republic facility and the Order is assuredly under surveillance. Find someone with more skills than sense so we can take one of the clones to them for a full workup. Hopefully that way we’ll learn how to deactivate it, whatever it is.”

Unspoken was the real possibility that deactivating the trigger mechanism might kill the clones, if it was neurological. Obi-Wan looked deeply unhappy, and Ahsoka thought she knew why: she knew it bothered him that the clones were, essentially, slaves to the GAR; it had bothered her too the more she’d thought about it, especially since she’d left the Order and its war behind. But she also knew that what made him a good commander—and he was probably the best general the Order had, except for maybe Anakin—was that he wouldn’t hesitate to commit his forces when needed, and that he was willing to pay a very high cost if necessary. Too many times, he’d paid it himself.

If the clones couldn’t be saved from whatever had been done to them, he might very well count their deaths as a necessary sacrifice to save the Jedi, and the Republic. She didn’t doubt that he would do it if he had to. Obi-Wan could be stone cold.

That was the real dividing line between her and her erstwhile fellows: they could still believe in the institution of the Order, because it had never betrayed them. But it had betrayed Ahsoka, and in the wake of that betrayal she hadn’t known who to trust; she hadn’t even been able to trust herself. She couldn’t bring herself to ask what it was like for Obi-Wan now, knowing that he couldn’t trust the legions who stood at his back.

How much of this he caught in the Force, she wasn’t sure; she kept her shields up pretty high these days, out in the wilds of Coruscant. Within the Order and the Army she hadn’t needed to worry so much about others’ intrusive thoughts and feelings. “All right,” Ahsoka said, looking back up at him. “I’ll find somebody. I assume you want this done yesterday.”

Obi-Wan actually smiled at her, a genuine smile of the kind that she wasn’t sure she’d seen from him since before Duchess Satine’s death. Ahsoka blinked, startled; and abruptly she realized that in this at least they were the same: unable to trust the Army or the Order, he’d turned to an individual he could put his faith in. Her.

Anakin had told her once that she and Obi-Wan were more alike than she knew. She hadn’t necessarily believed it, but maybe there’d been something to his words besides affection after all. For the first time in a while, the thought of him didn’t sting.

“Yesterday would be ideal, yes.” Obi-Wan reached into the satchel under his arm to withdraw a small, flat case, which he pushed across the table towards her. Opening it, Ahsoka saw quite a lot of creditchips, and a datachip with the logo of a Coruscant bank on it. “Let me know if you need more,” Obi-Wan told her. “I’ll cover all your expenses, and put the other half of the payment in that account.”

It was quite a lot of money, especially for the Jedi. The bombing investigation had revealed that the Order didn’t exactly pay the most generous wages. “Does the Order know about this?” Ahsoka asked, shutting the case and looking back up at him.

He looked distinctly shifty, an expression she remembered from some of their wilder missions. “As a councilor and High General, I have access to a certain amount of discretionary funds.”

At least she was well versed in how to interpret the Kenobi reserve. Translation: they didn’t know, and Obi-Wan was only going to tell them when and if it was already a fait accompli. Ahsoka couldn’t fault his reasoning. “Who else knows about—all this?” she asked, tucking the case into her own battered carryall. “The clones, and the Sith Lord?”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “The High Council, Padmé, and you. Come to think of it, we haven’t even told Padmé about the clones. I suppose we should.”

Ahsoka registered the new informality of his reference to Anakin’s not-so-secret paramour, her friend—and Obi-Wan’s too. “What did Padmé say? How is she?” She’d thought about going to her friend when she’d first left; they were friends, outside of Anakin and Obi-Wan and the Jedi. But she hadn’t wanted to lean on anyone else, and she hadn’t wanted to put Padmé in a difficult position politically; the Senator had already stuck her neck out quite far to represent her at her trial, when Palpatine and Tarkin had so obviously prearranged its outcome. But Padmé Amidala had been one of the people she’d been most tempted to comm during the long months of her self-imposed exile.

“She was shocked,” Obi-Wan said. There was a certain fondness in his expression which Ahsoka had seen before, but usually directed at Anakin, or on Anakin’s face when he talked about Padmé. What it meant now, she didn’t know, and it was only marginally relevant. “And then she decided it was all her fault in the first place and that she was the one who was obligated to deal with— _him_.” His expression flattened on the last word, and in the Force she caught the edge of his cold, implacable determination. Sidious had no idea what was coming.

“Padmé would think that,” Ahsoka said, taking another sip of her drink.

“Indeed. We had quite a time dissuading her.” He was clearly concerned, which was only rational; Padmé had an almost Jedi-like gift for finding herself in sticky situations, always for a worthy cause, and she had the long list of enemies to prove it.

Ahsoka eyed him. The idea that Padmé had given up on her responsibility to save the Republic, however self-appointed, was ludicrous, although on the other hand he’d been in her company much more recently than she had. But perhaps Obi-Wan was simply lying again, whether to himself or to her. Once again, it wasn’t the question at hand. “Right,” she said instead. “And my lightsabers?”

He indicated the satchel. “Not here.”

After a certain amount of subterfuge, they met up again in an alleyway a few blocks from the bar. Ahoska kept a portion of her awareness stretched to the Force around her, searching for any intent specifically focused on her, but there was nothing by the time Obi-Wan appeared, looking even more dangerous outside the bar than he had in it.

He took the satchel off his shoulder and passed it to her without a word. Opening it, she found a small metal case, and inside that—her lightsabers, looking just as they had when she’d lost them. Ahsoka felt Obi-Wan watching her, and she took both hilts in one hand to hand him back the satchel and the case before she stepped back, shifting the shoto blade into her left hand to ignite both blades at once.

To her surprise, in the neon-shot dimness of subterranean Coruscant they shone not green but blue.

Ahsoka blinked, staring. It wasn’t unheard of for lightsaber blades to change color—in Jedi fairy tales, the kind of stories she’d barely thought of since leaving the creche. Once tuned, a crystal normally retained its color thereafter, and she could feel that these were still the same crystals she’d obtained from Ilum on her own Gathering so long ago. “Has someone tampered with them?” she asked, looking to Obi-Wan.

In the pale blue light of the blades he looked far older, his face etched into a vision of a future fraught with pain. She couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t seem surprised. “No one has tampered with them,” Obi-Wan told her. “As a matter of fact, Anakin has guarded them assiduously since he recovered them after your trial, and he personally looked them over before I came tonight. I believe he mentioned something about…upgrades.”

She couldn’t bring herself to ask why Anakin hadn’t come, if he’d known where Obi-Wan was going. She thought she knew why; she’d disappointed him. For that matter, she’d surely disappointed Obi-Wan too. “So he retuned the crystals?” As she spoke, Ahsoka stepped into a readiness drill, whirling the blades around in a modified version of the opening ataru maneuvers. When she came to a halt, she faced Obi-Wan from a ready stance, crouched lower to the ground with the blades extended behind her in her preferred reverse grip.

“‘The crystal is the heart of the blade, and the blade is the heart of the Jedi,’” Obi-Wan recited, as if she hadn’t led a group of younglings on the Gathering herself. Ahsoka stifled the impulse to snap at him.

“I’m no longer a Jedi.” Even as she said it, she thought back to what she’d done on Level 001: on balance, it hadn’t _not_ been a Jedi thing. She couldn’t have explained it beforehand, and she couldn’t explain it now, either. But she thought it was part of what she could sense dimly all around them even now: some great change was coming.

Reluctantly, she shut down the blades and slotted them into the shoulder holsters Obi-Wan had included in the satchel, shrugging into the straps over her jumpsuit. It was only marginally less conspicuous than wearing them openly on her belt; she really needed a cloak. And not a Jedi-looking one, either.

His expression didn’t change. “And your lightsabers reflect that,” Obi-Wan told her steadily. In the Force she sensed a note of tension that wasn’t visible on his face. “It’s not uncommon for lightsaber wielders to retune the crystals to a different color after a great ordeal.”

Typical Kenobi deflection: Ahsoka barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes, or from pointing out that he had built three separate lightsabers and never changed the color. Blue was still a Jedi color; it just hadn’t been her color. But she had unquestionably changed, and she didn’t _dislike_ blue; it was Anakin’s color, Obi-Wan’s color. She just wasn’t sure she would have chosen it for herself. “You don’t seem surprised.”

He stroked his beard, then sighed. “It’s very Anakin. I’m sure he meant it as an expression of affection.” There was a note of apology in his tone; unspoken was the corollary that Anakin had perhaps gone too far—but it was a criticism that was difficult to voice. Anakin going too far had carried the day on dozens of battlefields during the war, and it would doubtless continue to do so until the war ended or it caught up with him at last.

Ahsoka took a breath and asked the other question she’d been avoiding before she could change her mind. “How is Anakin?”

Obi-Wan exhaled slowly. The Kiffar tattoos obscured his expression, but he seemed to tense, and she immediately worried about his answer. “Anakin is—not well,” he said at last. “In that same vision, we also saw an awful future, in which he—” He broke off, inhaled sharply, and then started talking again. “We saw Anakin fall to the dark side and become a Sith Lord,” he said, his voice flat with the effort of saying the words, and Ahsoka felt her mouth drop open.

“That’s not true!” she exclaimed, shocked. It couldn’t be true. She knew Anakin. He would never— “That’s impossible!”

Obi-Wan’s jaw tightened, and she didn’t miss the way his feet shifted, putting him into the beginning of a ready stance. “He was deceived by a lie,” he said flatly; “we all were. He became a creature of darkness known as Darth Vader, more machine than man. And I…I was the one who did that to him. We saw a vision of the two of us fighting to the death, only I couldn’t do it.”

There was no mistaking the bitterness in his words, the self-loathing in his presence in the Force. “Couldn’t do what?” Ahsoka asked, stepping forward involuntarily.

“I won the duel, but I couldn’t kill Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, his mouth twisting. “I told Yoda the same thing, in that future, when he sent me after him. Instead I cut off his remaining organic limbs and left him to burn to death. Sidious was the one who saved him, who put him into some kind of cyborg suit. Like Grievous, but far more terrible.”

General Grievous was pretty terrible in his own right. The thought of Anakin becoming anything like that left her mind reeling. “How—how did Anakin fall to the dark side?” Ahsoka asked. “I don’t—he would never—” The vision had to have been flawed.

“I thought the same,” Obi-Wan said, her own dismay reflected in his eyes. In the Force she felt the pit of despair beneath his words. “I thought he was the strongest person I knew, that he would ignore the temptation that we all feel. I was wrong. Sidious has been twisting him for years.”

Ahsoka swallowed whatever she’d been about to say at the pain in his face and voice. Instead, she reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, offering whatever meager comfort her presence could provide. In truth, she’d never felt the temptation of the dark side the way that other Jedi seemed to. They spoke of it as the easy path, the seduction of power, but she had only the most glancing experience with sensing its cold presence in odd moments of anger—much, she suspected, like the Jedi Master before her. She’d always thought that it would come to her in time, or that it would present itself in the guise of reason, as it had for Barriss. But maybe that wasn’t the case.

“I couldn’t have done it either,” she told Obi-Wan, feeling the inadequacy of the words even as she spoke them. “I couldn’t have killed Anakin, even knowing he’d fallen to the dark side. I never would have believed it possible.” It still didn’t seem possible, but there was no way that Obi-Wan was lying about this; she could feel his emotions in the Force far too clearly, raw and unrepressed.

“The Jedi were all dead, or as good as,” he said, his gaze unfocused: he wasn’t seeing her, but the visions in his memory. She could sense them in the Force around him, cold scraps of darkness shot through with heartbreak. “Palpatine gave the order and the clones slaughtered the Knights and Masters and padawans in the field, and _he_ slaughtered the younglings and everyone else in the Temple. And I still couldn’t do it.” Slowly, he bowed his head, and his hand crept across his chest to clasp hers on his shoulder. “What does that make me?”

“It’s not a crime to love someone,” Ahsoka said, squeezing his shoulder gently. It felt like another momentous step to say it, like walking away from Anakin down the Temple stairs had, but it wasn’t untrue. She loved her friends; that had become painfully clear through all the months of missing them. And there was no way that could be wrong in and of itself. It was possession, refusing to let go when you ought to, that was the real danger. “It’s not your fault that Yoda doesn’t understand other beings’ emotions, or that he only does enough to break or manipulate them.” The Grand Master had done it with her and Anakin in the first place, she realized now, and it didn’t seem any less cold-blooded than Sidious’ attempts to drive a wedge between him and the Jedi, from putting Pong Krell in command of the 501st to forcing her to face a military trial. “Obi-Wan, you’re the best of the Jedi, and the Jedi are the Force made physical. If you couldn’t kill Darth Vader, then it wasn’t his time to die.”

“What is a Jedi who can’t kill a Sith?” His voice was flat, but she could sense the anguish and despair beneath the words.

Out of a job, one way or another. “Someone who has a heart,” Ahsoka said, concealing her own dismay as best she could. Obi-Wan was just as vulnerable as the rest of them; he just didn’t show it very often. “Human.” Only after the words left her mouth did she realize just how much the sentiment reminded her of Padmé. But if there was one thing she was sure of, it was that emulating one of the best people she knew was anything but wrong.

They stood there together like that for another long span of seconds, Obi-Wan’s head still bowed, and Ahsoka felt her old bitterness welling up again, an unwelcome companion. There was a part of her, the part she liked least, that couldn’t help but think how unfair it all was. All she’d ever wanted was to be a Jedi. She hadn’t asked to grow up into the greatest war in a millennium, to be the apprentice of the purported Chosen One, to be forced to make an impossible choice between the path she loved and the Order that had betrayed her. Thinking about it now, she realized the same probably went triple for Obi-Wan; he hadn’t asked to be one of the leading Jedi of the Order just as a new era loomed. He hadn’t asked to become the only Jedi in a thousand years knighted in the field for killing a Sith, then to take that same purported Chosen One as his apprentice the very next day.

But he’d honored his promise to his dead master, and she’d accepted Yoda’s decision to make her Anakin’s padawan, and everything had fallen out the way it had.

 _The future, by its nature, can be changed_. She didn’t remember what had happened on Mortis very well, but she remembered the voice of the Son saying that. Frequently she heard it in her dreams.

All they could do was decide what to do with the choices they had been given.

Eventually, Obi-Wan exhaled again and squeezed her fingers slightly, giving her a ghost of the old charming smile as he looked up and stepped back. The expression looked ghastly, like stage makeup on a corpse, but Ahsoka kept that thought to herself. She felt the Force around them calm as Obi-Wan reasserted his control, tamping down his emotions behind his shields. “Anakin won’t thank me for telling you,” he said. “But—you should know. If the worst does happen, you’ll be in terrible danger.”

“So will you,” Ahsoka reminded him, but Obi-Wan shook his head.

“I don’t intend to survive, if it comes to that,” he said. “I’m not sure I could, really. Or, in that future, that I did.”

His implication was clear, and once again Ahsoka found herself at a loss for words. She cared for Anakin too, but not to that point; she’d proven that when she’d resigned the Order. Obi-Wan Kenobi, on the other hand, evidently loved Anakin Skywalker more than anything, maybe even more than the Jedi, or the Force. Suicide wasn’t the Jedi way, but she’d met a few suicidal Jedi during the war, and she’d seen him endure enough that she didn’t think he had it in him. But she could very much believe that he would just stop caring altogether. And in the galaxy these days that meant winding up dead sooner rather than later.

It was a staggering level of devotion, especially for a Jedi, and it occurred to her belatedly that Anakin somehow hadn’t known it. She remembered his reaction after Obi-Wan’s masquerade as Rako Hardeen had been exposed. “Have you told him that?” she asked, before she could think better of the question.

To her surprise—she’d expected another deflection—Obi-Wan nodded. “Yes, for once we were honest with each other.” His expression shuttered, and she knew better than to press any further.

“Then that’s already something different,” Ahsoka said. “There is still a way, Obi-Wan. As long as we don’t give up, we still have a chance.”

When the screaming started, Obi-Wan was awake and out of bed with his lightsaber lit in his hand before he even consciously noticed it. He frowned at the weapon humming in his hand, shining blue in the dimness of his room; he hadn’t realized his reflexes were on such a fine trigger, despite the fact that he slept with the weapon under his pillow these days.

Blinking, he realized that the screaming was coming from Anakin’s room. It didn’t sound like he was conscious; evidently his nightmares had received some upgrades since their experience on Lothal.

Obi-Wan deactivated the lightsaber but kept it in his hand as he entered the common room of the suite and crossed to Anakin’s door. His sleeping trousers had no belt to clip the weapon onto, an oversight he’d noted multiple times in the past few years.

The door was unlocked. Anakin was still screaming, something that might have been Obi-Wan’s name in the sound now. He strode through the bedroom, still crowded with portions of Anakin’s collection of junk, and after a moment’s hesitation, leaned down to put a hand on Anakin’s shoulder, saying his name. He was sound asleep. Obi-Wan sat down on the bed, dropping the lightsaber onto the carpet, and put both hands on his shoulders to shake him before his eyes snapped open.

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin gasped. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving. He reached out a trembling hand to touch Obi-Wan’s cheek; shocked, Obi-Wan didn’t object. Tears were slipping unnoticed down Anakin’s face. “Obi-Wan, you’re alive, I—thank the Force.”

Once, Obi-Wan would have parroted the standard line about dreams passing in time, but Anakin’s dreams had proven distressingly accurate even before Lothal. Instead, he brought his own hand up to Anakin’s face, brushing the tears away with his thumb. He had failed Anakin once, but he wouldn’t do it again. “What did you see?”

Anakin shut his eyes, forcing his breaths slower and deeper. “I saw him killing them,” he whispered. “The Jedi. The Separatists. Obi-Wan, I saw him Force-choking Padmé! And I saw him kill _you_. You were so old, and you looked so sad—and Padmé looked so heartbroken—”

None of this was terribly surprising; hearing his words, Obi-Wan could sense the shape of it in the Force, looming in some dim and not yet fully averted future. Forcing Anakin to destroy the people who loved him—them repudiating the Sith he had become—would do far more to seal his loyalty to the Sith Lord than anything else. “Anakin, it hasn’t happened yet, and it will not happen. You are not Darth Vader.”

The name resounded in the Force between them, and Anakin flinched. “I wish I knew why he did it,” he said, his eyes on some vision that only he could see, or perhaps his memories of Lothal. “If I just knew _why_ —”

There were so many possible reasons. “There may not have been any one thing,” Obi-Wan said quietly. It wasn’t like Quin, who’d consciously tried to wield darkness to defeat the dark, and been consumed by it instead. “It could have been the accumulation of any number of small things. Or it could just as easily have been some lie of Palpatine’s. Lies are the way of the dark side.”

It wasn’t clear whether his words had registered. “I can’t lose you, Obi-Wan,” Anakin whispered, still staring into a corner. “I can’t lose you or Padmé. It would destroy me.” That was a truth that Obi-Wan couldn’t argue with; Ahsoka’s departure had fundamentally destabilized him. “But I saw _him_ —he destroyed both of you and he didn’t even care.”

Obi-Wan had his doubts on that point, but they were irrelevant for now. “Anakin, you won’t lose me or Padmé,” he said, squeezing his shoulders. Anakin’s skin was warm beneath his hands. “Even if we died, we would always be with you.” Death wasn’t the only parting, though he wasn’t sure that Anakin had ever understood that. 

Anakin sucked in a breath. “I—he lost them before he killed them, I think. And that was _why_ he killed them, maybe.” He shut his eyes. “I don’t want that to happen. No matter what. Even if I have to die to stop myself from becoming a Sith, then that’s what I’ll do.”

 _Over my dead body_ , Obi-Wan thought. He had lost too many people to the Sith already; he would be damned if he let them have Anakin too. “It hasn’t happened yet,” he said again, gently. “And as long as you still feel this way, it never will.”

Anakin swallowed. “I saw him,” he said again. “He looked like Death itself in that suit, but he was already a monster before you fought him.” For another long moment his gaze remained fixed on a future that only he could see, then he let out a breath and looked back up at Obi-Wan, brushing his own thumb over the line of Obi-Wan’s cheekbone before dropping his hands to his lap.

“I’m sorry to put you through this,” he said, bitterness shadowing the words. “You shouldn’t have to deal with—me—on top of everything else.”

An apology from Anakin was an extremely rare event, and Obi-Wan blinked, surprised. “You were screaming,” he said after a beat. “I couldn’t very well ignore it.” Deflect, deflect, deflect. It was still his first habit with Anakin, though it wasn’t terribly fair to either of them. Obi-Wan had never expected fairness out of life.

Anakin rubbed his throat with his right hand, the metal gleaming dully in the dim light filtering through the blinds. “I guess not. But you know that’s not what I mean.”

Obi-Wan did know, and in the middle of the night it was too easy not to pretend otherwise. “I won’t leave you,” he said again. Anakin had been dreaming about Vader murdering people; he had been dreaming about their duel, which came to him mostly in the flash of blue lightsabers in a world of red—except for the final, brutal move when his future self had cut that future fallen Anakin down and left him to burn, ignoring his screams. That he saw crystal clear, every time. “Not this time.”

“You and Padmé are both crazy,” Anakin said, his voice rising. “Ahso—Ahsoka is the only damn one of you who has any sense. She saw that I would drag her down, and she got out! And you should do the same!”

After their meeting earlier that night, Obi-Wan was certain that even Ahsoka hadn’t left Anakin in any way that mattered. “You don’t get to make that choice for me, Anakin. Or for Padmé.” Or for Ahsoka, if Obi-Wan’s half-formed suspicions about where the path she now walked led proved true.

Anakin let out a laugh, half bitter and half rueful. “Don’t lie to me again, Obi-Wan. I know Padmé has been wondering lately whether she chose the right Jedi—the right man—” The implication of his words was clear in the Force, and Obi-Wan blinked. Anakin caught it, whether on his face or in his emotions, and his expression twisted. “We talked about it, you know,” he said; “at the diner. I know she cares about you, and you wouldn’t have to work very hard to care about her, I don’t think. You two should—should be together and leave me behind. You’ll be safer that way. And you both deserve to live.”

Obi-Wan had never let himself think directly about any of this before, and the implication that he didn’t care about Padmé stung; she was near the top of the short list of people still alive that he _did_ care about. Uncharacteristically, he said the first thing that came to mind. “Anakin, you wouldn’t be happy that way. And regardless of my feelings for Padmé, it doesn’t have to be either/or.”

He couldn’t have said which of them was more shocked at his words; the silence stretched out between them like ripples filling a pond. Anakin stared at him, his mouth half-open. “Why does it matter whether I’m happy?” he demanded at last. “And would you—you would want that?”

“I can’t speak for Padmé,” Obi-Wan said, which was only half true. In any case, he had clearly said too much, and this was not a topic he wanted to explore further at the moment, not least because he had somehow gotten far ahead of himself. “But as to why it matters—Anakin, we both love you.”

It was the second time he’d used that word aloud. The third, if one counted his future counterpart in the vision. That was three more times than he’d ever been planning on letting it pass his lips in his life, but it was too easy to tell Anakin the truth now, in the middle of the night in their old shared quarters. They were both bare-chested; he still had his hands on Anakin’s shoulders, because Anakin hadn’t moved to dislodge them.

“Well, you shouldn’t,” Anakin said, bitterness on his face and in his voice. “And I wouldn’t take odds on Padmé not divorcing me, either.”

“She makes her own choices, just as she always has.” Obi-Wan squeezed his shoulders, his skin warm under his hands. “Anakin, listen to me. Neither of us is going to repudiate you for things you haven’t done. We are all capable of terrible deeds. The point is that we choose not to commit them.”

For once, Anakin seemed to be listening, though not necessarily to what Obi-Wan was saying out loud. He could feel the pressure of his scrutiny in the Force. “I used to think you didn’t know what it was like,” he said slowly. “To want to kill someone who hurt someone you cared about. But you do, don’t you?”

As he frequently had since Satine’s murder, Obi-Wan had seen Qui-Gon’s death on Naboo in his own nightmares again that night. He remembered clearly what it had felt like to have his beloved master die in his arms: he still couldn’t say whether it had been worse when it had been Satine.

Normally he would have found some way to dodge the question, but even this topic was preferable to the previous one. “I have,” Obi-Wan admitted quietly. “Thus far I have fought through it every time, although some calls have been closer than others.” Maul in particular had brought out the worst in him. Everyone had their breaking point; but where his was, he didn’t yet know, and that unnerved him. “You’re not alone, Anakin.”

Anakin was still staring at him. “All right,” he said at last, coming to some conclusion Obi-Wan couldn’t follow. “But Obi-Wan, neither are you.” The intensity of his focus was palpable in the Force between them, and Obi-Wan, taken aback again at the strength and depth of Anakin’s emotions—his love—could only nod. He gave Anakin’s shoulders one more squeeze, then started to rise to go.

He wasn’t entirely surprised to feel the cool weight of Anakin’s metal hand on his own arm. “Stay?” he asked, and when Obi-Wan looked at him he actually blushed a little. The possible double meaning was on both their minds, lingering unspoken between them. “Just—just to sleep,” Anakin continued determinedly after a beat. “If you’re here, maybe I won’t dream about you dying.” _Just everyone else_ , Obi-Wan heard in the Force.

There were so many ghosts in their past, even without adding future visions into the balance.

It was true enough that they’d shared rooms and beds many times over the past fourteen years. Jedi didn’t have much concept of personal space, and the exigencies of the war had pushed them into some truly close quarters at times. “I could say the same to you,” he said, relenting, and he felt the warmth of Anakin’s flash of pleasure at his agreement. It was too much like what going to bed with him with intent would be like, and he kept his tone as brisk as he could (not very) as he said, “Move over, you’re on my side of the bed.”

“I’m pretty sure both sides of this bed are mine, old man,” Anakin grumbled, but he shifted over as Obi-Wan transferred his lightsaber from the floor to under the closer pillow, then climbed into the bed. Though it was wider than the shipboard bunk they’d shared after Lothal, it wasn’t really meant for two people, and the line of Anakin’s back was more than a little stiff next to him.

To hell with it. Obi-Wan hitched himself in and put his arm around Anakin, cinching him in close, Anakin’s warm, muscled back against his bare chest and his shaggy hair tickling Obi-Wan’s nose. He ignored Anakin’s surprised noise and flattened his fingers over his breastbone, just next to his heart. Tentatively, Anakin’s organic hand crept up to cover it.

When their knees were fitted together there was enough room.“Goodnight, Anakin,” Obi-Wan murmured, already sinking into sleep. Even if it hadn’t been anything else, the warmth was nice, and Anakin’s familiar scent was comforting.

He felt that same spark of happiness flare from Anakin again. “Goodnight, Master.”

The datachip from Master Sinube proved to contain a complete, current copy of his database on the Coruscant underworld, painstakingly compiled over a lifetime working as an investigator within it. Sitting on her bunk in her room over Nyx’s garage—really it was a storage loft, there were still a few crates wedged in between the foot of the bunk and the wall—Ahsoka paused. She’d felt a whisper of intuition from Force when she’d heard the message Obi-Wan had given her, but seeing the Cosian Master’s life’s work on her datapad really brought home to her that he believed he was going to his death.

Another casualty of the war, and if she didn’t find someone who could tell them about these bio-chips or whatever they were, the rest of the Order would follow him soon. Ahsoka plugged the chip into her data pad and started running a search for a neurosurgeon who fit within Obi-Wan’s parameters, tying to put thoughts of Sinube aside so she could focus on the here and now. It wasn’t entirely successful; she couldn’t stop her thoughts returning to her chase through the upper levels in pursuit of her lightsaber, with the Cosian’s help. Looking back, she couldn’t believe how young she’d been.

By the time the search finished running it had yielded a few potential leads, enough that she thought at least one would pan out eventually. But of course time was of the essence; she could feel the Force prodding her at the back of her mind even if Obi-Wan hadn’t told her as much. Shrugging into her shoulder holster, Ahsoka headed down the ladder to her speeder.

The first two neurosurgeons she tried proved wholly unsuitable. One was, prosaically, a low-functioning alcoholic, while the other turned out to have an alarming penchant for death sticks. The second one did live near a secondhand clothes emporium where Ashoka, browsing, found an Alderaanian-style asymmetrical cloak in a satisfyingly un-Jedi-like olive green. She paid cash and wore it out of the store: the fewer people who saw her lightsabers, the better.

The third lead was named Bronwyn Quo, and Sinube’s data said that she had been thrown out of her job at a prestigious hospital on Hosnian Prime for being too honest with her higher-ups. Also possibly for being obsessed with the paranormal and its possible medical investigation to an embarrassing degree. Now the female Tholothian apparently operated a combination cash-only moonlight neurosurgery practice-cum-paranormal activity investigative outfit in the mid-2000 levels. Ahsoka ascended through the second-closest shaft, remembering what it had felt like to jump into one, away from Anakin and everything she’d ever known. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but her choice had probably already been made then.

The clinic didn’t look like much from the outside, but that didn’t necessarily mean much. Ahsoka parked her speeder in a paid lot a few blocks away and doubled back via a different route; she was being more paranoid than normal, but justifiably so. The clinic entrance’s weapon scanner pinged for her blaster, but not her lightsabers, which was a reassuring statement of Quo’s seriousness and also not surprising; only higher-end equipment was normally able to detect the unusual Jedi weapons. Ahsoka put the blaster in a lockbox and walked through the entry door. She was nowhere near as good with one as Obi-Wan, though she was a better shot than Anakin, who was useless with anything smaller than a laser cannon, but she didn’t really like carrying it.

Inside the office was bigger than she’d expected, looking like more of a workshop than a medical facility: there was no reception desk or any other waiting area, just a single open space with what she took to be a few surgical beds and imaging equipment at one end, and various machines, detectors, readout screens and gadgets filling the lab benches and the remainder of the open space.

Whatever she was expecting, the Tholothian on the other side of the lab bench to one side of the door wasn’t it. She was wearing a (promisingly clean) white lab coat with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows over a nondescript grey jumpsuit with combat boots. When she looked up from some machine of unclear purpose, the spark in her corundum blue eyes was bright behind her safety goggles.

“You don’t look like you have brain cancer,” the Tholothian said without preamble, putting down her multitool on the lab bench beside her. Ahsoka noted that her dark skin was marked with small scars on her hands—lab accidents? “Did you get on the wrong side of a Geonosian neuroparasite?”

“Actually, no,” Ahsoka said, blinking. The mention of Geonosian neuroparasites gave her a pang, but she moved past it. “Dr. Quo, I presume?”

“That’s me,” Quo said cheerfully, sliding her goggles up over her headdress. “Don’t tell me your name, I don’t want to know. If it’s not cancer or brain worms, what are you here for?” Before Ahsoka could reply, she waved her hand at one of the tall stools a few meters away. “Sit down, you look as stiff as a glowrod.”

Ahsoka opened her mouth and shut it again. After a moment, having resisted the automatic temptation to use the Force to retrieve the stool, she walked over to it, dragging it back over towards Quo’s lab bench. The last thing she wanted was to use the Force to influence this woman, which meant honesty. She sat down on the stool, and Quo wheeled away from the lab bench to face her full on, crossing her arms expectantly.

Sometimes the only way out was through. “You probably get this a lot,” Ahsoka said after a beat, “but I have a friend who wants to have his head examined.”

“Mygeeto?” Caleb asked. “That’s in the Outer Rim, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Master Billaba replied, handing him a data pad. “It’s a Banking Clan world; we thought we’d cleared it after First and Second Mygeeto, but the Separatists have dug in on the mesas. We’ve been ordered to go in and drive them out.”

Caleb ignored the data pad for the time being; he’d have plenty of time to read whatever it said later. “When do we leave?” He tried his best to project the calm readiness that Masters like Obi-Wan Kenobi exuded at all times, but he couldn’t help the note of eagerness that he knew leaked into his voice, and into his emotions in the Force. He’d wanted nothing more than to be a padawan and fight in the war, and now his chance had finally come.

Master Billaba frowned. At first Caleb felt a pang of alarm, thinking that she was disappointed in his reaction, but when she didn’t say anything right away, he reached out into the Force for himself. Through their bond, he could sense concern mixing with the determination she felt to finish the war, mixed with…uncertainty?

They were sitting in the common room of their new shared chambers, Caleb perched on a meditation cushion and Master Billaba seated on the edge of the couch. “Master…” Caleb hesitated. “Is something wrong?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Instead, with an exhale that was almost a sigh, she pushed to her feet and went to stand by the window, looking towards the Temple staging area that had been reactivated for the war. Master Kenobi’s flagship currently sat in the docking cradle closest to the Temple, undergoing hasty repairs to the damage it had taken at Second Mon Cala. From this angle its command tower was just visible.

The Force between them swirled, like the surface ripples that betrayed a fast-flowing stream, and he felt her emotions sharpen to some decision. Master Billaba turned back around to look at him, her brown eyes keen. “Caleb, before we deploy to Mygeeto, there is something that you must know.”

The temperature in the room seemed to drop slightly, the shadows deepening. Caleb felt his own eagerness cool, reacting to the somber concern he felt. “What is it, Master?” he asked, more than a little worried by the grim turn of her thoughts.

Master Billaba exhaled slowly, crossing her arms to grip her own elbows in her hands. “It’s about the clone troopers,” she said after a long moment. Her normally fierce energy was unusually subdued. “The Council has learned that they could be turned against us.”

“Turned against us?” Caleb repeated. He hated to sound so clueless, but he had no idea what she could be talking about. “What do you mean? How?”

“When Master Kenobi learned of the existence of the clones on Kamino before First Geonosis, he was given to understand that the armies had been commissioned ten years before by Master Sifo-Dyas,” Master Billaba said, and Caleb nodded; everyone in the Order knew that. “Sifo-Dyas had been stripped of his Council seat for being a warmonger just a few months before he died; I was his replacement on the Council, as a matter of fact.”

For a moment, her gaze and her thoughts softened, probably snared by her memories of the years before the war. Caleb had been a toddler then, barely even a youngling, and he couldn’t really understand what older Jedi meant when they talked about those days. He and everyone else he knew had grown up into a galaxy in flames. “The Council has learned that, even if the idea for the clone armies was Sifo-Dyas’s initially, a Sith Lord managed to interfere with them somehow. The clones have all been implanted with a control chip.”

The Sith, the ancient enemies of the Jedi, who had reappeared fourteen years ago on Naboo after a millennium in hiding. He’d studied the holorecording of Master Kenobi’s fight with the Sith Lord there, who they now knew was called Maul, with a fervor that many of the older younglings had teased him about. “A Sith Lord?” Caleb repeated. “Who?”

Master Billaba looked grim. “Count Dooku,” she said, her voice flat. “The Council believes now that he turned to the dark side before he left the Order, and that he murdered Sifo-Dyas to prevent anyone from finding out about his treachery, or about what he had done to the clones.”

Caleb shook his head, automatically trying to deny her words. He knew about the dark side of the Force; everyone did. He knew that it was a slippery slope, a dark path from which no walker returned. But the idea that it could… _infect_ a Jedi Master like that, and Master Yoda’s former padawan to boot, was far scarier than someone like Lord Maul, who as far as anyone could tell had been born a power-hungry murderer. “What does the control chip do?” he asked, though he had the sinking feeling that he wasn’t going to like the answer.

But Master Billaba didn’t reply immediately. Instead, she sat back down across from him and met his eyes. “Caleb, what I am about to tell you is a secret that you must keep from anyone who is not a Jedi,” she said. “And don’t tell any of the younglings who aren’t already padawans, either. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Master,” Caleb said, swallowing. He met her eyes and saw approval there, which buoyed him, as did the knowledge that she was willing to trust him with whatever she was about to say. No matter what, he wasn’t alone.

“Good.” Master Billaba paused, then took another breath. Caleb could feel her reaching for calm through the Force. When she did speak, her words were measured, warding off some powerful emotion. “If they are activated, the control chips will override the clones’ own willpower and compel them to carry out something called Order 66, which the Council believes is an order to kill all Jedi as traitors to the Republic.”

“Traitors to the Republic?” Caleb exclaimed, shooting to his feet. “The _Jedi_?” It was ridiculous—it was inconceivable that anyone would believe it. The Jedi Knights had been the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy for a thousand generations; the Order and their mission predated the Galactic Republic, which itself had been brought into being only through the sacrifice of the Jedi in the Sith Wars. “That’s impossible!”

Master Billaba heaved a sigh. “Calm down, padawan. You must understand—the Jedi are extremely unpopular in the galaxy right now. Do you remember the protesters outside the Temple after the speeder bay bombing? Did you hear what Padawan Offee said in her confession before the Supreme Chancellor, at Padawan Tano’s trial?”

Only the High Council had been present at the trial, along with Jedi Skywalker after he’d brought Bariss Offee in, but the story had gone through the Temple like a wildfire. “Yes,” Caleb answered. “But no one believed it! She had fallen to the dark side, and everyone knows you can’t trust a darksider. The dark side is the province of lies.”

The fact that she didn’t immediately agree with him was not reassuring. “That may be,” Master Billaba allowed after a beat, “but it doesn’t mean that Padawan Offee was entirely wrong when she said that we ourselves had fallen from the light and had become nothing but warmongers. And whether she was correct or not, she was only saying what many, many people across the galaxy already believe.”

She seemed so sunk in gloom that Caleb frowned, caught by a thought that would have been unthinkable ten minutes ago. “Master—do you believe that? Do you believe that the Jedi have fallen to the dark side?”

Master Billaba exhaled again. He could sense her focus as she chose her next words. “Before Haruun Kal,” she said carefully, “I would have denied it with all my being. They thought I had fallen to the dark side there, you know—the rest of the Council. There’s a reason that they put me through such stringent trials before they let me reassume my rank and command.” And she still hadn’t regained her Council seat, even though Master Rancisis’ had been vacant since his death.

Caleb didn’t say anything for a long moment, waiting to see if she would continue. When she didn’t, he gathered his courage and spoke. “Master, you didn’t answer my question.”

“I know, Caleb.” She took another deep breath. “It’s not wrong for us to fight evil,” she said after a pause. “That is why the Jedi were founded, our fundamental purpose, and the Separatists are doing great evil in the galaxy. But in waging the war, the Republic has done no small harm itself, and I no longer think that we were right to join the Supreme Chancellor’s civil war over mere political differences. We thought it would be short and victorious; it has been long and grueling and destructive. And our involvement certainly prolongs the conflict.”

“But what other choice do we have now?” Caleb asked.

She turned her hand palm up on her knee, the equivalent of a shrug. “I don’t know what other choice we have, padawan,” she said sadly. “No one does, not even Master Windu. And there are other reasons for which the Council believes that it would be ruinous if we withdrew now.”

“The Sith Lord,” Caleb said, and she nodded. No one knew who the Sith Lord was; for a long time after the Battle of Naboo there had been much argument about whether the Sith whom Master Kenobi had vanquished there had been the master or the apprentice. When Count Dooku had revealed himself to be a Sith Lord on Geonosis, the presence of his acolyte Asajj Ventress had caused many Jedi to argue that Dooku must have become the master at some point in the intervening decade. But others—including Caleb himself, who’d noted repeatedly in his debates with other younglings that Ventress had never taken a Sith name—had argued that he must be the apprentice. On one level it probably didn’t matter, but Caleb couldn’t shake the feeling that if they could just somehow learn their enemy’s identity they might still have a chance.

Master Billaba gave no sign that she had caught the drift of his thoughts. “The war has been engineered to destroy us,” she said finally. “That was always its true purpose, and we walked into the trap willingly. But we would not now be standing on the edge of the knife if we had not already been complicit in destroying ourselves, and what it meant to be Jedi.”

The idea that the Jedi Order had somehow become agents of the dark side was a lot to take in, and some part of him rebelled against it. “I don’t understand,” Caleb said, unable to keep a plaintive note out of his voice. “It’s not wrong for Jedi to fight evil, but it was wrong for us to wage this war? And—you’re still going to Mygeeto, aren’t you? Aren’t _we_?”

“We are,” Master Billaba said, standing. He could feel her doubts receding, the sun of her resolve coming out from behind the clouds. “The Separatists are oppressing the people there, and whatever else we are, however consumed by our own fear and arrogance we may be, we cannot refuse to act now. But Caleb—be wary of the clones. If they turn against us, it won’t be of their own volition. But we will have very little warning, if any.”

“They don’t know?” Caleb asked.

She shook her head. “No. They are as ignorant as any of us were, and considerably more innocent.”

“Are you going to tell them?” He had never given much thought to the Republic’s clone troopers before, besides his passionate yearning to fight alongside them, but it seemed monumentally unfair that they should be left both ignorant of their own natures, and with no choice but to obey them. It was hard to see how that wasn’t just another word for slavery. And the Jedi had declared slavery to be the scourge of the galaxy many times throughout their long history.

Master Billaba paused. “I should,” she acknowledged. “But to tell you the truth, I am not sure how.”

After a substantial downpayment, in cash, Dr. Quo proved extremely amenable to Ahsoka bringing her “friend” by for a full work-up. Ahsoka got the impression that, once she determined that there was something in the clones’ brains, she would view dealing with it as an enjoyable challenge. She could only hope that the renegade scientist wouldn’t ask too many questions about the circumstances her patient found himself in.

Buoyed by this development, Ahsoka headed to Dex’s diner, taking an indirect route to get there. She hadn’t noticed being followed since she’d left the Order, which made a certain amount of sense now; Palpatine probably had her on a list of people to capture or kill after his planned slaughter of the Jedi. It didn’t take much imagination to foresee that under Palpatine’s empire she would have only one choice: resist or serve.

But all the same, it didn’t do to take chances; aside from her own personal present and future problems, there was Nyx to think about too. After he’d been kind enough to take her in and let her crash at the garage, the last thing she wanted was to bring any kind of trouble back to his door.

Dex was nowhere in sight when she entered the diner. Ahsoka ordered the special and was halfway through her meal when Hermione strolled by to refill her cup of caf. “Dex says to see him in the kitchen when you’re finished, hon,” the human told her. Harmony, as everyone called her, wasn’t as efficient or as experienced as WA-7, but she was a friendly face, and Ahsoka liked her. The Force knew there wasn’t exactly a surfeit of friendly faces in the lower levels of Coruscant.

Ahsoka polished off her food and her caf and ducked behind the counter to enter the kitchen, where she found the Besalisk information broker stationed over the stove, seemingly doing four things at once.

“Good to see you, Ahsoka,” he said, letting out a grunt as he used two of his arms to fry something that smelled delicious in a pan in front of him while he stirred a boiling pot of stew with another, flipping nerfburgers on the grill with his other arm. “What’s up?”

“I need you to pass our mutual friend a message,” Ahsoka told him, keeping well back from the stove. It smelled delicious, but she had no desire to find herself wearing any of it. “I’ve found the mad doctor he wants. Her name is Bronwyn Quo.”

Dex chuckled, as though she’d just told him a joke. “You think he needs to get his head checked out?“

Of course Dex already knew about Quo. “I don’t think it’d hurt,” Ahsoka said, smiling a little. “If he can’t meet at her place three days from now, I’ll arrange another time.” She hesitated. “Tell him to come in disguise. And just him—no sky guy. He’ll know what I mean.”

“Hmm.” Dex regarded her for a moment, but he didn’t press further. Ahsoka met his gaze squarely; she knew she was avoiding Anakin, but she also knew that he was incapable of maintaining a disguise and that he had a chancy temper. It was better for all of them if he never got anywhere near Quo. He might take whatever she found far too personally.

That she had no idea what to say to him when they did meet again, and that therefore part of her wanted to put off their reunion until she did, was entirely beside the point.

“All right, I will,” Dex said at last, then turned to put another pan on the stove as he plated whatever he’d just finished cooking with his upper arms. “Order up!” he shouted, and WA-7 rolled into the kitchen to whisk a pair of steaming plates away. Dex turned back to the stove, stirring steadily. “Ahsoka, you’re friends with the Senator from Pantora, aren’t you?”

Abruptly, the Force sang with a note of caution, like a burst of light shone directly into her eyes. Ahsoka blinked, automatically putting her weight on her back foot in the start of a ready stance. “Yes,” she said. “Why? What have you heard about Senator Chuchi?”

“Well, lots of things,” Dex answered, which wasn’t exactly reassuring. “Most of it’s probably just the usual Senate gossip.” Ahsoka kept her face neutral, and after a beat he kept talking. “But what I thought might concern you is that word is someone has put a pretty big price on her head. No firm details on who, but I’ve heard the name Tyranus.”

Tyranus. Count Dooku. Almost certainly acting at Palpatine’s bidding. “A bigger price than the one on Senator Amidala four years ago?” Ahsoka asked, because she’d heard that story and she knew this tactic. Now it even made sense: with Padmé in hiding, the way had been clear for Palpatine—Darth Sidious—to manipulate Jar Jar Binks into calling for emergency powers in her stead. After that the war had only been a matter of time, even if Yoda had been the one who started it at Geonosis.

The Besalisk shook his head. “Same price when you adjust for inflation.” The war had been a boom time for bounty hunters, and their prices had risen accordingly, to say nothing of the galactic economy in general increasingly going to shambles. “But the contract apparently requires her dead, quick.” He sighed, flipping some kind of patty on the grill with a spatula as he did so. “Normally I’d go straight to our ginger friend, but he’s got his hands full these days, and so do the rest of his…co-workers. Can I leave it with you, or do you think I should tell him anyway?”

Even if the Force hadn’t practically turned into a blinking neon sign, Ahsoka wouldn’t have hesitated. She and Riyo were friends, and she hadn’t forgotten the risk the senator had taken by standing up for her at her trial. It wasn’t often that she got the chance to repay an obligation, or return a favor. “Tell me everything you know, Dex. I’ll take care of it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back! On Bastille Day, which seems fitting. I did not mean for this chapter to take a month, but complications arose, revisions were needed on the second half, and I was in crunch time making a vid that will premiere at Con.Txt next weekend. The next few chapters should come out on a much more regular schedule as they are already written and need much less revising.


	9. The Thin White Line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A true heart should never be doubted.

The news from Ahsoka was extremely welcome, but it also presented a fresh set of difficulties. Obi-Wan couldn’t fault her logic in asking him not to bring Anakin along with him. But in all practicality their two best choices for asking a clone to put his life on the line to understand these bio-chips were Rex and Cody, and the idea of asking Cody filled Obi-Wan with a formless dread which he recognized from previous key junctures. That left Rex, who was Anakin’s captain, and Ahsoka’s friend. Obi-Wan was prepared to use her name to Rex if he had to, but he wasn’t looking forward to doing so in front of Anakin.

Damn Sidious, anyway.

“Why doesn’t she want to see me?” Anakin demanded, scowling, when Obi-Wan broached the subject of approaching Rex about this underworld neurosurgeon. He hadn’t taken Obi-Wan’s decision to go alone to his meeting with Ahsoka particularly well the first time, either, though it had been the evening of his meeting with Palpatine and he’d still been too wrung out emotionally to do much more than sulk. Today he was in a more energetic mood.

Obi-Wan frowned at him. “Anakin, you told me yourself that Ahsoka had disappointed you. She knows that, and, I would wager, she doesn’t want to be reminded of it.”

“But that doesn’t mean—” Anakin shut his mouth abruptly, crossing his arms over his chest and shoving himself further back on the meditation cushion. He showed no sign of leaving Obi-Wan’s suite for his own rooms, and Obi-Wan had given up on the idea of asking when he would. He didn’t actually mind in the slightest. “That doesn’t mean I don’t care about her, or I’m not worried about her,” Anakin continued in a more controlled tone. “And—I failed her too. _We_ failed her.”

For his own part, Obi-Wan couldn’t disagree, though he stood by his assessment that Ahsoka had allowed her emotions to cloud her judgment at the critical moment. He would just as rather not have been in the middle of the fraught relationship between his former padawan and his former padawan’s former padawan, but his life had only rarely ever been about what he actually wanted. “The same goes for her,” he said after a beat; “she cares about you just as much. She asked about you, in point of fact.”

Anakin looked at him, his mouth twisting. In the Force his emotions were clouded with bitterness, but Obi-Wan got the sense that most of it was self-directed. “And I suppose you told her the truth.”

The temptation to prevaricate flickered, but that way lay destruction. “I told her enough,” Obi-Wan said cautiously. “She deserves the same warning the rest of the Order is getting.”

There was a short, tense silence. “It’s just as well,” Anakin said at last, staring determinedly at a point to one side of Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “She deserves to know she made the right choice.”

“If she did make the right choice, that wasn’t the reason why it was the right one,” Obi-Wan said sharply, but Anakin only shook his head, denying the words. He’d clamped down on his shields, buttoning down his emotions. “Anakin. She has already proven that she can make her own choices. Her attachment to you will not be her undoing.”

At that, Anakin did look up to meet his eyes. “Unlike you, Master.”

Obi-Wan felt the impulse to look away and let it pass through him, continuing to hold Anakin’s gaze. “If that is my destiny,” he allowed after a beat, and Anakin turned his face aside. “Now. Where can we find Captain Rex?”

Captain Rex turned out to be playing darts in 79’s. Smile fixed very firmly in place, Obi-Wan led Anakin past several drunk clones who were standing around outside, only one of whom appeared to recognize the Jedi generals before they made it into the bar itself. Inside, the mixed crowd of clones and other sapients didn’t seem to take much notice of them, but Obi-Wan had led these men and their brothers for nearly four years: he marked the slight pause in the conversations around them that spread out in ripples through the bar’s patrons as the news of their appearance traveled.

With Anakin in his place at his back, Obi-Wan made straight for the bar, trying to accept the way that the clones moved back for him automatically without seeming arrogant about it. Once there he leaned his arm on the counter. “What’ll it be, General?” asked the bartender, a no-nonsense looking orange-skinned Twi’lek woman, when he caught her eye. Her sleeveless leather vest and leather trousers showed off what Obi-Wan took to be clan tattoos coiling around her biceps, markings that were echoed on her semi-wrapped lekku.

Obi-Wan flashed his Jedi Council credit chip in his other hand. “A round of drinks for the house, on me!” he said, projecting his voice to fill the space around them as much as possible over the sound of the music and the sport matches playing on the screens.

Free alcohol, however, was a remarkably effective incantation; another of those ripples began slowly traveling through the bar as everyone began elbowing their buddy, passing the news of the insanely generous Jedi General along to the next person. The bartender rolled her eyes, but she took his credit chip when he handed it over to open a tab. “And what’ll you have, General? Generals?” she asked, eyeing Anakin over Obi-Wan’s shoulder.

“Corellian brandy on the rocks,” Obi-Wan told her. “Make it a double.”

Behind him, Anakin said, “Better make that two.”

She served them their drinks first, and they moved away from the bar as the rest of the patrons began congregating for their complimentary libations. For a few moments, no one was paying attention to them, and Obi-Wan was absurdly conscious of the weight of Anakin’s gaze. “What should we drink to?” Anakin asked, still staring at him.

Obi-Wan opened his mouth, then shut it again. Normally he drank to the Republic, and sometimes to the Jedi Order, but neither felt appropriate now. After a moment he decided to throw caution to the winds and lifted his glass. “To Padmé Amidala,” he said, keeping his eyes on his partner. “May she have no regrets.”

Anakin’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “To Padmé,” he echoed, and clinked his glass firmly against Obi-Wan’s before he drank about half the liquor in one go, his eyes watering a little. Obi-Wan, meanwhile, finished the whole thing right off, enjoying the burn traveling down his throat.

“Have you been to see her?” he asked Anakin quietly as they moved deeper into the bar, toward the darts boards set up at the back.

“No.” Anakin’s mouth was drawn tight, the set of his shoulders unhappy. “I tried a day ago, but Ellé told me she was out and wouldn’t say where, or doing what. Normally I would just go over there, but—” He stopped abruptly, his eyes sliding to Obi-Wan and then away. “I don’t know what to say to her. We talked, you know, about me resigning the Order after the war ended, about her leaving the Senate. But not since Ahsoka left. And I don’t know if she wants that anymore. If she wants me.”

Only long practice allowed Obi-Wan to hide his surprise at the idea of Anakin and Padmé quitting everything to retire—to Naboo, presumably. It sounded absurd to him, the kind of dream that young idiots in love dreamed, not battle-hardened Jedi generals and influential galactic politicians. He couldn’t imagine either of them ever being happy with that kind of life, though he could easily envision both of them wanting to be the kind of people who could. “Would you?” he asked, as neutrally as he could manage. If Ahsoka’s best destiny was with the Jedi Order, the same went double for Anakin. He was a Jedi Knight, and a damn good one, even in these difficult times. Qui-Gon had been right all those years ago on Tatooine.

Anakin scowled. “It’s not hard to imagine leaving the Jedi Order, Obi-Wan, especially since—” He glanced at Obi-Wan, hesitating. “Especially since I always thought you’d disown me once you found out about me and Padmé,” he continued in a rush. “Before we got married, even when I thought about leaving the Order, I could never imagine leaving you. Now, I don’t know.”

“Well,” Obi-Wan said after a moment, “just so we’re clear, I won’t disown you.”

Anakin let out a sound that might have been a laugh and tossed back the rest of his drink. “I had kind of figured that out, yeah.” He set the glass on the table next to them and toyed with it for a minute, then looked up. “I meant what I said, you know, about you not being alone. I won’t leave you behind, no matter what happens.”

Obi-Wan reached out to clasp his shoulder, not knowing what else to say, though the words inspired an upwelling of warmth and affection that was positively dangerous. From the slight smile that lingered at the corners of Anakin’s mouth, though, he’d felt Obi-Wan’s emotions for himself. And liked it. Obi-Wan bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling, but he knew when Anakin’s grin widened every so slightly that his expression had gone stupidly fond anyway.

All that aside, there wasn’t anything else to say; the war could still kill one or both of them, and the Council could very well still decide to throw them both out of the Order. In either case, none of this would matter.

In the meantime, their duty lay ahead of them, sipping a beer in between rounds of darts. Rex turned his head, saw them, and put down his glass, surprise clear on his normally professionally stoic face. “General Kenobi, General Skywalker!” he said loudly through the ambient noise, gesturing them over. “Fancy meeting you here!”

“Hi, Rex,” Anakin said, leading the way as he exchanged handshakes, claps on the back and even a fist bump with the group of troopers standing around the darts boards. Rex was playing against Cody, who was, by the look of things, getting trounced in this round. “How’s it going?”

“Not too bad,” Rex said, exchanging a glance with Cody. From their emotions in the Force, neither of them seemed particularly troubled by their generals’ appearance, even though it was unusual. “What brings you down here, Generals?”

Anakin shrugged theatrically. “Obi-Wan is bored with all the bars topside. Too many of them have him on their banned patrons list.”

“Now, Anakin, don’t leave out the part about how you’re the one who got me on those lists in the first place,” Obi-Wan said, as archly as he could manage, and the clones roared with laughter. “Gentlemen, I could use another drink,” he said, trading a glance with Anakin. “Anyone else? It’s on me.”

As expected, there was no shortage of takers. A year ago, Obi-Wan might have worried about explaining the charges to the Order’s bursar, but he’d taken on most of Mace Windu’s duties including the supervision of the Order’s finances, and so now he was ultimately reporting only to himself on that score. It was true that he was in the perhaps unique position in Jedi history of having to worry about money: the Order’s finances were increasingly strapped by the war, and at their current rate of losses they’d be broke within five years. The only good thing to be said about that prospect was that if they all had to become mendicants the dwindling conservative faction of the Order would probably be satisfied at last.

Though if they wanted to explore alternative revenue streams, they could evidently make a killing selling lightsabers to collectors and kyber crystals to arms dealers.

Obi-Wan put that thought out of his mind as best he could, reminding himself to focus on the here and now. The future would take care of itself, or it wouldn’t; what he had to do now was drink booze, play darts, and figure out a way to talk to Captain Rex alone.

Anakin had never had any occasion to figure out whether he was any good at darts, and it didn’t really seem fair for a Force user to play someone Force-blind with no handicaps. Rex, Cody, and their friends agreed, however, that they’d take the alcohol as enough of a handicap, at least initially. After he and Obi-Wan won handily anyway, they quickly worked out a numerical handicap to give them instead. Jedi could get drunk, but it took a lot of effort compared to most sapients, and the effects faded quickly.

Nevertheless, Anakin was feeling the rounds of drinks by the time everyone but Rex and Cody had departed, accompanied by cheerful grumbling about the length of their leave and promises to take the Jedi for all they had in the next rematch. The four of them played another round, in which Anakin, more for the novelty than anything else, decided to lose horribly. It was weirdly…fun. It had been a long time since he’d done anything with so little riding on it, even if it was part of a larger operation that had everything riding on it; the war hadn’t exactly left him much time to pursue any new hobbies. Jedi didn’t really have hobbies anymore.

Rex had never been slow on the uptake, and when Cody headed off to find the refresher he quirked an eyebrow at Anakin and Obi-Wan over the rim of his beer glass. “So what’s so important that you came all the way down here to talk to me, instead of just pinging me on the com? Sirs,” he added when they didn’t immediately respond.

“It’s extremely important,” Obi-Wan said quietly after a moment, shifting in closer to Rex over the table. Anakin stretched a good portion of his awareness out to the Force, alert for any sign that anyone was paying them any untoward amount of attention; he knew that Obi-Wan was doing the same. “But we can’t actually talk about it here. Or in any GAR facility.”

If Rex was alarmed by his words, he didn’t show it. “What about the Jedi Temple?” he asked, taking another sip of his beer.

“No easy way to get you in without people knowing,” Anakin said, leaning in himself. His back was itching like he had a target on it, but that was just the adrenaline kicking in. “Rex, we think we know about what happened to…” He hesitated, unwilling even to say it aloud, then quickly reached out and drew the two strokes of “5” in the condensation beaded on the table with one gloved finger. As soon as Rex glanced at it, giving him a tiny nod, he wiped it away with the flat of his hand.

“I’d like to know that myself, General,” he said, his eyes going distant. Fives had been his friend.

“It’s the whole shebang, Rex,” Anakin said, compelled to warn his captain even if that meant he wouldn’t cooperate. He was unwilling to give Rex one iota less of a choice than possible. “If things go wrong, and even if they go right, we could wind up hunted by both sides. Or just dead.”

Rex shook his head a little. “Sounds like just another day in the Grand Army of the Republic. Sir.” He looked up, and Anakin caught sight of Cody across the room, making his way back over to them. “There’s a derelict shop ten floors down, on the north face of the skyscraper,” Rex said quickly, keeping his voice quiet. He was a professional. “I’ll meet you there on the landing after this.”

Anakin had time to nod as Obi-Wan excused himself to settle the bill, stopping to exchange a few words with Cody as he went. He and Rex traded one more glance, then Anakin clapped his captain on the back and shook Cody’s hand, making his farewells before he headed to the refresher.

Actually reaching the exit after he emerged took some time; he was intercepted by multiple groups of clones, most of whom wanted him to do shots with them. In the end Anakin escaped only a few more drinks for the worse, but by the time he did make it through the door, the cooler air of the Coruscant night was extremely welcome.

He found Obi-Wan outside telling another group of clones some long joke, evidently from his Rako Hardeen phase, which normally was deeply upsetting for Anakin to think about but which behind the haze of alcohol seemed much less heartrending than it actually had been. He found himself watching Obi-Wan, the play of the neon lights on 79’s exterior and the underlighting of the city planet’s omnipresent background glow across his face. He looked tired, but he’d looked tired every day since First Geonosis. The blue and pink illumination from the signage highlighted the silver hairs that were starting to creep in at his temples; it made him look distinguished, but it was also unfair. Obi-Wan was still young; for that matter, so was Anakin, though the war felt like it had lasted a thousand years.

He was still the handsomest man Anakin knew, and he still wanted him.

Obi-Wan finished the joke and, as the clones’ laughter trailed off, caught Anakin’s eye and bade them all farewell. They walked slowly towards the public lift, feeling the clones’ attention on them naturally dwindle as they dawdled. A quick twist of the Force was all they needed to effectively disappear from sight as they entered the lift and took it down, navigating through the skyscraper’s public interior corridors to the shop Rex had mentioned.

There was an unsecured door to the shop’s exterior landing platform, and when they stepped through it, without speaking they split up to check the perimeter for any nasty surprises or eavesdroppers. Finding none, they settled down to wait, Anakin perching on a rail of the fencing that marked the shop lot’s boundaries and Obi-Wan standing next to him.

“Are you drunk?” Obi-Wan asked, amused, when Anakin’s foot slipped off the lower rail.

“Drunk, no,” Anakin said, frowning, or trying to. He could feel Obi-Wan’s amusement intensifying, which suggested that he hadn’t actually achieved his desired expression. “Mildly intoxicated, yes.”

“Hmm.” Obi-Wan regarded him with a raised eyebrow, smiling slightly, then turned to look back down the street. It was still empty, which was just as well.

“What does that mean?” Anakin asked, giving up on the railing and sliding back down to the ground. Once he got his feet under him, he stepped into Obi-Wan’s space, close enough to share body heat.

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you like this,” Obi-Wan said after a beat, glancing back at him. “You were what, seventeen the last time?”

Anakin remembered the incident to which he was referring to, or more precisely, he remembered consuming quite a lot of Nautolan vodka at the after party thrown by the street racing club whose races he’d just won handily. He didn’t remember much else after that until he’d woken up in the Temple with the galaxy’s worst hangover and Obi-Wan looking at him disapprovingly.

The memory of that look was what made him realize what Obi-Wan was trying to do. It wasn’t working, because Anakin wasn’t seventeen anymore and Obi-Wan didn’t look at him the same way he had then. Now, his affection suffused the Force around them, and Anakin knew what the way he looked at him meant.

“I guess so,” he said casually, turning his head to look at Obi-Wan. “Things are pretty different now. In a lot of ways.”

“Indeed.”

“For one thing, I’m not actually drunk.”

“So you keep saying.”

“Yeah,” Anakin said, tipping his head back to look up at the sky. There weren’t really any stars to be seen on Coruscant, just the lights of the myriad ships flying through the city planet’s airspace and orbiting at every feasible distance. It had taken him a long time to get used to that when he’d first arrived. Even in the rare dark of the moons on Tatooine, the stars were bright enough to navigate by. “The point is that I’m in my right mind when I do this.”

Obi-Wan turned to look at him, and Anakin had just enough time to register the concern on his features before he reached out and put a hand on the back of Obi-Wan’s neck, pulling him in for a kiss.

It wasn’t like kissing Padmé, his only frame of reference worth mentioning. For one thing, he didn’t have to bend his neck so far, and for another, Obi-Wan’s beard was rough against his mouth. Every other thought was driven out of his mind when Obi-Wan’s lips curved into a smile under his and he kissed him back.

Whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been that. Obi-Wan swallowed his involuntary sound of surprise, but he paused, withdrawing a little, until Anakin pulled him back in, kissing him deeper than before. They were clutching each other, his organic arm wrapped around Obi-Wan’s waist and Obi-Wan’s hands curling up over his back to his shoulders, anchoring him and holding him close. He didn’t know how much time passed like that, just that he very much never wanted to stop, until he heard the unmistakable sound of someone clearing their throat not very far away.

Rex was standing just in front of the interior door a few meters away, looking more than a little uncomfortable behind the professional blandness of his expression.

Obi-Wan stepped away immediately, putting some space between them, though he kept one hand on Anakin’s lower back. It was actually quite remarkable how quickly he could smooth out his own features, but the illusion of unflappability was belied by the way that he and Anakin were both breathing hard. Anakin could feel the heat of arousal on his own face and thrumming through his body, and he reached out to the Force for what calm he could find.

“Captain,” Obi-Wan said, clearly trying for serenity but utterly failing to sound like he hadn’t just had Anakin’s tongue down his throat. If Anakin had dreamed about his normal voice before, hearing what he sounded like addled with sex was going to keep him up nights for the rest of his life. “Thank you for coming.”

Rex stepped forward slowly, shooting Anakin a glance that he couldn’t immediately decipher through the haze of thwarted arousal and lingering alcohol. The clone troopers were sterile, to protect the Kaminoans’ intellectual property, but other than that they were fully functional humans. It couldn’t be the first time he’d been in this sort of situation. “It seemed important, General,” he said after a moment, crossing his arms as he came to stand next to them. “What’s going on?”

Anakin let Obi-Wan do the talking; there was a reason he was called the Negotiator. Instead he concentrated on pulling himself together as Obi-Wan gave Rex the high points of what they’d learned and what they supposed about the clone armies, the bio-chips, and Order 66. Some part of his ever-present tension was allayed when Obi-Wan uttered the phrase and Rex didn’t do anything like reach for his blasters and try to kill them both: more evidence that the command most likely was keyed to Palpatine somehow.

“That’s quite a story, Generals,” Rex said when Obi-Wan finished, with another glance at Anakin. “Where do I come in?”

“We want to find a way to deactivate the chips,” Anakin answered, the warm weight of Obi-Wan’s hand on his back a reassurance as he spoke. “If Tup’s chip malfunctioned, that indicates that it could be altered, or deactivated, or removed.” Rex kept watching him, saying nothing. “We’ve found a neurosurgeon in the underworld who will do a full neurological workup, no questions asked,” Anakin continued, gesturing inanely towards his own skull. “Now we just need a volunteer.”

“And you want me,” Rex said, looking between them. “Why?”

Because Obi-Wan had categorically refused to consider Cody, and that left them with only one real option. “We trust you,” Anakin said. “You know us, you’re independent-minded—”

“As opposed to other clone troopers?” There was an unfamiliar note in Rex’s voice, and his tension was spiking in the Force. Anakin shut his mouth, suddenly realizing how that sounded.

“That’s not what I—”

“He’s drunk,” Obi-Wan told Rex, sliding his hand up to grip Anakin’s shoulder and ignoring Anakin’s protest to the contrary. “What he means is that we know that you and your brothers don’t have a choice in fighting for the Republic. But you’ve shown that you have the capacity to think and act on your own recognizance despite that, and given the potential consequences, we wouldn’t want to ask anyone whose ability to consent is impaired. Inasmuch as we can.”

He looked deeply upset by the time he finished, and Rex’s expression softened a little. “You don’t sound very happy with the way things are, General,” he said. “Even aside from everything you’ve just told me.”

“We’re not,” Anakin said when Obi-Wan didn’t immediately reply. His partner’s thoughts were in the darkness on Umbara. “But nothing will be better for anyone if the Order is destroyed and the Republic falls.” Well, maybe not everyone, but gangsters, Sith Lords, and Palpatine’s cronies definitely didn’t count.

Rex looked at both of them for another minute or two, the silence stretching. “A lot of my brothers have died in this war,” he said at last. “Fives. Tup. Dogma. Heavy.” There was a note of bitterness in his voice that Anakin wasn’t accustomed to hearing, but he remembered it from Anaxes. Rex sighed. “I’ll do it.” He uncrossed his arms, looking down at his hands, then back up at the two Jedi. “If it’ll help free my brothers, I’ll do just about anything.” 

At Obi-Wan’s suggestion, they took an air taxi back. The presence of the driver made it impossible to talk, which was a relief, but it didn’t prevent the atmosphere from immediately turning awkward. He and Anakin sat side by side, not speaking but acutely aware of each other’s proximity nonetheless. Obi-Wan didn’t want to raise his mental shields and shut his partner out, but he didn’t want to perceive Anakin’s emotions as he talked himself out of the idea of ever repeating what he’d just done. He didn’t necessarily want Anakin to find out just how much he’d liked it, either.

In the end he compromised by raising his shields enough to deflect casual attention, but not so tightly as to wall himself off completely. Once he got out of Anakin’s immediate presence, he could shove his inconvenient emotions—his _attachments_ —back down where they belonged, in the corners of his soul where he tried to neither think about nor act on them. He’d been good at that once. Now he was no longer even certain whether he should be trying to do it at all, but it was still the only way he knew.

He loved Anakin, and yes, he wanted him; for that matter, he cared deeply about Padmé, and if she’d given him any indication of interest in the years she’d been on Coruscant before First Geonosis, he’d have gladly become her lover, regardless of how a younger Anakin might have felt about it. But now it wouldn’t be a casual affair, just as nothing with Anakin could ever be casual. And Obi-Wan wasn’t exactly short on enemies, of the kind who’d proven repeatedly that they were willing to hurt the people he cared about to hurt him. Neither Anakin nor Padmé deserved to be further endangered for the sake of gratifying his own personal emotions.

_What are you afraid of, Kenobi? And how is it not unbecoming for a Jedi Knight to live a life defined by fear?_

Sometimes the impulse to act on his feelings anyway expressed itself in Qui-Gon’s voice. At other times, it was Quinlan’s. Either way, he couldn’t deny that there was a certain logic to the idea that since he was already attached, and since the rest of the Council was almost certainly already contemplating throwing him out of the Order, he might as well. And if he was honest with himself, he knew that both Anakin and Padmé wouldn’t take kindly to the idea that they needed to be protected, least of all at a cost to him.

But that was separate from the question of whether he deserved to have something like that. After what he’d seen himself do on Mustafar, in the world between worlds, he was by no means certain that he did. Or that he was strong enough to put the good of the many above his own relationships, if it came to that.

They alighted from the taxi at the far end of the Processional Way, leaving them perhaps a kilometer of plaza to cross on foot to the Temple Gates. Obi-Wan hadn’t brought his cloak, or he would have thrown his hood up over his face to forestall attempts at conversation, but Anakin didn’t say anything, merely walked beside him in silence.

At the base of the Temple steps, however, he slowed, and Obi-Wan turned back towards him from where he stood a few steps higher. “For the record, I don’t—it wasn’t—” Frustrated, Anakin ran a hand though his hair. “I just didn’t want to die without having—done that,” he said at last.

Obi-Wan stared down at him. “Well, mission accomplished,” he said, turning to resume climbing the stairs. “You can cross me off your list.”

“Obi-Wan, what—” Anakin began, then swore, and Obi-Wan heard him taking the stairs two at a time to pass him, turning so that he could stare down at him from above. Obi-Wan kept climbing steadily. “I don’t understand what your problem is,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’m the one who has to worry about falling to the dark side, not you.”

“Do you really think that’s true, Anakin? The dark side calls to all of us,” Obi-Wan said, not turning to look as he passed him. “Yes, even me.”

“But you’d never succumb to it,” Anakin said from behind him, and the absolute conviction suffusing his voice and the Force around them was equally heartening and dangerous. No one, not even Qui-Gon, had ever believed in him more wholeheartedly. And no one stood to suffer anywhere near as much if Obi-Wan failed. “Unlike me. You—you’re _the_ Jedi, Obi-Wan, just as you are now. You told me that I’m still a Knight despite my attachments—the same has to be said of you.”

Obi-Wan reached the top of the stairs and turned back to his best friend as he too crested the platform. For some reason, the sight gave him a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature: a whisper from his nearly useless precognitive talent. “Anakin, you know how I feel,” he said at last, running a hand through his hair. “And you know how I was trained. I cannot just—ignore all of that.”

Anakin was watching him closely, and Obi-Wan accepted the pressure of his scrutiny in the Force, dropping his shields. Anakin already knew everything already; why was he bothering to try to hide? “I’m sorry,” he said after a long moment. “I guess I shouldn’t be trying to—tempt you into breaking your vows just because I already have. Just because I want you. You’re stronger than I am.” He looked away, his mouth twisting, and Obi-Wan reached out unthinkingly to put a hand on his organic arm.

“The vows I’ve broken have all been my choice,” he said, putting all the weight of his conviction into it. It was, after all, nothing less than the truth. “Starting when you were only a child, right up until now. Whatever happens to me, Anakin, I don’t want you to blame yourself.”

Anakin stared at him, the night breeze stirring his too-long hair around his scarred, beautiful face. Obi-Wan loved him more than his soul, and the thought that Anakin might return that emotion, in whatever degree, was exhilarating and terrifying. “I won’t,” he said after a long moment. “Just as long as whatever happens to you happens to me too.”

Obi-Wan didn’t know what to say to that, so instead he nodded, as if they had settled anything. Turning, he led the way through the arcade of the Gates, acknowledging the Knights of the Temple Guard standing on watch with their lightsaber pikes held at the ready as they passed them standing at the top of the short staircase that led into the Temple proper. There were only two of them; before the war there had never been fewer than six Knights on duty, but even the Guard were stretched thin these days.

They didn’t get more than a hundred meters inside the Great Hall before a familiar tall figure turned a corner in their direction. Mace Windu didn’t look particularly surprised to see them, but then, he had his ways. “Obi-Wan, Skywalker, just the people I was looking for,” he said, drawing to a halt a meter or so away. As the Master of the Order glanced between them, Obi-Wan knew what he was seeing: they were both obviously not quite sober, and the energy thrumming between them, however awkward, was too overtly sexual to be mistaken for anything else. “Obi-Wan, I wanted to talk to you,” he said after a minute, when it was clear that neither of them was going to attempt any kind of courtesy. “Skywalker, if you’ll excuse us.”

Anakin bowed, the gesture too slow to be automatic. “Master Windu,” he said, and then looked at Obi-Wan. “Master.”

“Goodnight, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. He turned to follow Windu as his colleague led the way into the turbolift to the northwest spire, which held both the Council chambers and the Grand Master’s rooms, both about equally likely as a destination. Either he was about to be royally chewed out by Yoda, or the Council had voted to remove him in his absence, just as they had for Sifo-Dyas fifteen years ago.

The unspeakable irony was that even though his fellow Councillors had shunned him as a warmonger, Sifo-Dyas had been right.

After the doors hissed shut they rode in silence for perhaps fifteen seconds, then Windu unfolded his hands from his robes and turned toward him. “Obi-Wan,” he said, sounding a little annoyed, “stop looking like I’m taking you to your death. I told you, your standing in the Order is secure as long as mine is.” By long tradition decisions on Council membership had to be unanimous, so in that bare tactical sense Windu was right.

Normally Obi-Wan quite liked and respected Mace, and they got along well, which was good: if things continued the way they had, they’d be spending the next two or three decades working closely together. But if they weren’t going to an emergency Council session they were going to talk to Yoda, and that was the last thing he wanted to do at the moment. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

Windu eyed him. “You remind me of Dooku sometimes,” he said after a moment, shaking his head. “Too arrogant to even admit that other people can get a read on you, much less that you care about them. And a champion liar to boot.”

Obi-Wan opened his mouth and shut it again, floored. He’d had the same thoughts himself at times, but it was very different to hear them from the most respected master in the Order. “I seem to recall my skill as a liar being very convenient for the Council,” he said eventually, unable to keep his voice from going stiff. “And as for my lineage, we are what Yoda made us.”

“Yes, and that’s the entire problem with you and Skywalker, and Dooku too for that matter,” Windu said. “Your lineage will break before it bends, and you may just take the entire Order along with you.”

Mace’s lineage was not without its own problems, although Depa Billaba had regained her sanity along with her consciousness and was agreed to be able to resume a Council seat; maybe they’d give her Oppo Rancisis’, if they could ever find enough time to put it to a vote. Regardless, only one lineage in the Order had a Jedi turned Sith Lord in it—two, if you counted Anakin’s possible future. Obi-Wan was extremely reluctant to do so. “I don’t want that to happen,” he said at last.

“Neither do I,” Mace said flatly. “So do whatever you have to do to stop it.” The turbolift halted, and he reached out to hit the button to hold the doors, turning back to look at Obi-Wan. “Speaking of which, I don’t want to know about whatever operation you and Skywalker are running with the clones.”

“So you’ll be able to officially disavow us with a clear conscience?” Obi-Wan asked, with a touch of grim humor.

Mace released the lift doors and, when they slid open, stepped through them into the corridor. “So I don’t get my hopes up mistakenly.”

Obi-Wan stared after him long enough that the doors started to slide shut; he had to move quickly to make it through before they closed completely. Once in the corridor, he took a deep breath, drawing on the Force to clear his head. The effort left him with the beginnings of a headache lurking in his temples, but the last thing he wanted was to talk to Yoda less than completely sober.

The Grand Master’s rooms were located just a few levels below the Council chambers. Although the position had circulated amongst many Jedi Masters in the first half of the past millennium, Yoda had occupied it for the previous four centuries, and the rooms had long since been wholly transformed to suit his needs and whims. Normally Obi-Wan found them charming, but tonight the whole place felt airless and stifling, as though history had turned into a weight pressing the occupants down, rather than a firm foundation for them to stand on.

Yoda was sitting on a meditation cushion near the windows, whose louvered blinds let in the ever-present night lights of Coruscant, but only slantwise. He didn’t look up when Mace and Obi-Wan entered the sitting room, his eyes open but staring into the middle distance, apparently sunk deep in thought. Mace sat down, adjusting his robes around him, while Obi-Wan poured himself a glass of water from the jug set on the small table to one side.

At length the Grand Master inhaled and looked up at them. Meeting his eyes, Obi-Wan gave him a respectful nod. Even if Yoda weren’t the most senior Jedi in the Order and the head of the Council, he also stood at the head of Obi-Wan’s lineage, a chain of masters and padawans stretching back to the Jedi of the Old Republic. Yoda had been trained by Jedi Knights who remembered the Ruusan Reformation, whose masters had won the Sith Wars with their own hands. Until recently, Obi-Wan had never had cause to wonder about whether that approach was still suited for the current Jedi Order, a thousand years later. Now it was constantly on his mind.

“Sorry to disturb you, I am, Obi-Wan,” Yoda said, and Obi-Wan made a gesture of acknowledgement as he crossed over to another meditation cushion and sat down, putting himself on Yoda’s eye level. “Concerned about your partner, we are.”

The only way out was through, and the only way to deal with this conversational gambit was to counter it head on. “I’m concerned about him too, Master,” Obi-Wan said. “And about all of the Jedi.”

Mace and Yoda exchanged a glance, but their communication in the Force didn’t have the same easy quality Obi-Wan had always sensed before Yoda had gone to Moraband, of all places. “Too much under the sway of the Chancellor, he has been,” Yoda continued, as if Obi-Wan hadn’t spoken. “Much anger there is in him. Much fear.”

“All of us were deceived by the Supreme Chancellor,” Obi-Wan said, keeping control of his voice with an effort. “Anakin has no intention of heeding any more of his lies.”

“So certain are you?” Yoda asked. “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. So easily shake off Sidious’ influence, he cannot.”

“What is true of Anakin is no less true for all of us.” The words came out sounding much flatter than natural, but he said them steadily. “How many times have we acceded to the Chancellor’s requests? How choked with darkness has the Force become through our actions?”

“In the grip of his emotions, young Skywalker admits that he has done terrible things,” Yoda said, his voice rising. “Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.”

“With all due respect, Master, jealousy is not the only end point of attachment,” Obi-Wan countered, resisting the urge to look at Mace. “And to pretend that we do not have attachments—if only to our brethren in the Jedi Order—is folly. If Anakin is to turn aside from the dark path, it will be because of his attachments, not despite them.”

Yoda’s frown deepened. “Selflessness, defeating the Sith requires. Proved that, my masters’ masters did through their victory in the Sith Wars. Sacrifices, we must be prepared to make, to uphold their legacy.”

“Selflessness is not the same as being unattached,” Mace said, speaking up for the first time. “And sacrificing others without their consent is just another name for murder. You may be prepared to stake the members of the Jedi Order as pieces in your grand struggle against the Sith, Yoda. But the rest of us are not willing to pay that price, for the galaxy and for ourselves. We know now that your masters’ masters failed to defeat the Sith. That alone must lead us to question whether their methods are still appropriate.”

He unknowingly echoed Obi-Wan’s thoughts, a sign of their like-mindedness.“We know you went to Moraband,” Mace continued. “Is it true that you have been granted the secret of immortality?”

The Force around them was stiff with Yoda’s disapproval. “Immortality there is only in the Force,” he snapped. “A time to die there is, to everything and everyone. That is the way of things. The way of the Force.” However circular, the words weren’t a denial. Obi-Wan felt Mace’s realization of that rippling through the Force around them.

“Do you want Anakin to sacrifice himself to save the Jedi, or fall to the Sith?” Obi-Wan asked. “Is he a Jedi Knight in his own right, or your weapon against Sidious?” He stopped, taking a shuddering breath, but both his fellow councilors could perceive the question he didn’t ask: _Do you believe, Yoda? Do you believe in the Chosen One?_

“Too attached to your former apprentice you are, young Obi-Wan,” Yoda said after a beat, evidently electing a different tack. “And to his Senator paramour. Blinded by your own emotions, you are.”

“I would sooner trust my attachments—my _connections_ —than your willingness to answer power with power in the name of objectivity, Master,” Obi-Wan said, letting an edge creep into his voice. “The war has warped all of our judgment, and I am no exception to that. But I know where my allegiance lies: to the Jedi and to democracy, not to the Chancellor’s phony war and your pride in waging it.”

He didn’t even think before speaking the words, but once he had, he felt no impulse to take them back. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that Barriss Offee had spoken in truth, however twisted her methods or her reasoning: in waging the war, the Jedi themselves were being consumed by the dark side. Indeed, Sidious had evidently designed the entire conflict to do precisely that, and the Order had danced to his tune every step of the way. It was obvious that Anakin wasn’t the only Knight who had hatred or fear within them. But he was one of the few brave enough to admit it openly, even if he had done so in extraordinary circumstances.

The words reverberated in the air between them, the silence stretching out. “Obi-Wan,” Mace said quietly when Yoda made no reply. “Are you resigning your commission?”

Obi-Wan took a deep breath, trying to pull himself together. “No,” he said. “I will not abandon my fellow Jedi, or my troops; they are certainly innocent. But neither will I continue blindly following orders that I know are wrong.”

The light of a particularly bright hovercraft illuminated Yoda’s face in passing, and Obi-Wan couldn’t help but think of another discussion with his master’s master’s master. _I will train Anakin, without the approval of the Council if I must._ Perhaps, after that singular moment of defiance, his destiny had been leading towards the obedience, however shell-shocked, he had seen his future self display in that vision of a devastated future. But Obi-Wan couldn’t emulate that any longer. And he wondered how much of Yoda’s refusal to send him against the Emperor in that future vision had been self-aggrandizement, and how much underestimating his abilities, and how much the desire to finally break Obi-Wan of his attachments and remake him in the image of the Jedi he’d always wanted.

Yoda was nearly nine hundred years old, with all of his life spent in the Order; he should have stood at the head of a baker’s dozen of lineages. That only Dooku and his line were still extant out of all of them was not exactly to the Grand Master’s credit, once he stopped and thought about it. However bluntly he’d put it, Mace was probably correct when he said that Yoda’s lineage was too brittle for their own good.

The silence stretched, Obi-Wan’s tension and Yoda’s displeasure suffusing the Force in the room.“I hope right you are,” Yoda said at last. “Revisit this discussion, we will.”

“My answer won’t change, Master,” Obi-Wan said, standing. He gestured his water cup over to the sterilizer unit in one corner, then turned back to bow to the Grand Master. “Goodnight.”

To his surprise, Mace followed him out the door when he left, and walked with him down the corridor back to the turbolift in silence. “Do you know how long he’s been watching Anakin?” Obi-Wan asked once the doors had slid shut behind them and he had entered the number of the nearest connecting floor on the keypad. “Or exactly how closely?”

The Master of the Order didn’t bother to deny it. “At least since his solo mission with Senator Amidala before First Geonosis,” he said. “Yoda sensed something then that raised his suspicions, though I’m not sure he ever learned precisely what. If he did, he hasn’t shared it with me. Since then, very closely. He probably knew about their affair as soon as you did.”

Obi-Wan had suspected the moment Anakin and Padmé had entered the arena in that ridiculous chariot, and he’d known for certain in the gunship an hour later. It seemed so long ago now, but it hadn’t even been four years. With a sigh, he began consciously unclenching the muscles in his neck and shoulders, scrubbing a hand over his face. He wanted nothing more than to go to sleep, wake up, and find that all of this had been a nightmare. He’d settle for sleeping and waking up again in the morning. “To what end? If he doesn’t believe that Anakin is a Jedi—”

“I don’t think that’s quite it,” Mace said after a moment. “It’s not that he doesn’t think Skywalker is a Jedi so much as he thinks he’s the wrong kind of Jedi. Assigning Ahsoka Tano to him as a padawan was a bid to anchor him further in the Order, to give him some stability. Just as his attempts to have Tano discover his affair with Senator Amidala were an attempt to force him to end it.”

Yoda didn’t know that Anakin and Padmé were married, and neither did Mace or anyone else on the Council. They had agreed to keep it that way until the end of the war; the fewer people knew about it, the safer Padmé would be in any event. And if Yoda had meant for Ahsoka to be an anchor for Anakin, he’d destroyed his own stratagem by acquiescing to the Chancellor’s pressure to expel her from the Jedi Order so she could face a military trial. The line between connections and attachments was so thin as to be illusory. “Ahsoka figured it out at least a year ago,” Obi-Wan said wearily. “And she approves. She and Senator Amidala are good friends in their own right, you know.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mace said, with a touch of asperity. “I’m the Master of the Order; I’m not supposed to have to care about the friendships of padawans. The friendships of padawans aren’t supposed to be the fulcrum on which the fate of the galaxy turns.”

“We do live in interesting times.” The lift slowed to a halt, and the doors slid open.

“I don’t disagree with you, you know,” Mace said as he stepped out of the lift behind Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan turned back to look at him. Mace looked tired, which was unusual; he also looked somewhat annoyed. “We owe our fellow Jedi and the clones a duty of care and an obligation. And even if the war is nothing more than a plot to destroy the Jedi, killing Sidious tomorrow wouldn’t stop the evil of Dooku, or Grievous, or Maul in their own right. Nor would it magically bind up the galaxy’s wounds. To say nothing of the damned gangsters. ” He sighed. “No matter how much I wish that were so.”

“So do I,” Obi-Wan said. The war had brought the galaxy to its knees; where Jedi had once kept the peace, crime syndicates, warlords and marauders now had free rein, with innocents caught between them and a Republic that had neither the capacity nor the genuine will to protect them. They would spend the rest of his life dealing with the fallout, one way or another.

They slowed to a halt at the cross-corridor heading to Obi-Wan’s rooms. Mace reached out and put a hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder, though it wasn’t clear which of them was meant to be reassured by the gesture. “If there is a way, we’ll find it,” he said. “We are Jedi.”

As reassurances went, it was pretty weak sauce; their track record over the last decade wasn’t exactly stellar. But Mace knew that as well as he did, if not better, so Obi-Wan nodded, taking his fellow councilor’s words in the spirit in which they were meant. “I just hope that’s enough.”

Inside his rooms, the only physical sign of Anakin’s presence was his pair of boots tossed in a corner of the common room, but Obi-Wan could sense his sleeping mind, uneasy, in the Force. He wasn’t surprised to find Anakin in his bed, passed out on his stomach and wearing only a light pair of sleeping trousers. He didn’t stir until Obi-Wan got into the bed beside him, which admittedly was bigger than the one in his old room they’d shared the other night.

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin said, his voice and his presence in the Force muzzy with sleep. “You’re back.”

“You’re in my bed,” Obi-Wan pointed out, pulling the covers up over them both.

“It smells like you.” Which to Anakin in his current state seemed to be enough of an explanation; in his current state, Obi-Wan didn’t want to have that discussion.

“Goodnight, Anakin,” he said instead, and reached out with the Force to turn off the lights.

The hard part was figuring out how to talk to Riyo without anyone noticing. Ahsoka was reasonably certain that her friend was under surveillance by Palpatine’s agents; despite the fact that the Confederacy had murdered one of his daughters, the Pantoran chairman was a staunch-anti Palpatinian, one of the few remaining who made a point of expressing his views openly. According to the scuttlebutt in the Senate watering hole where Ahsoka had spent hours the previous night nursing drinks and eavesdropping for all she was worth, Riyo had been forced to distance herself from him to preserve her moderate amount of influence on Coruscant, which had put her at odds with the majority of public opinion on Pantora itself. She was between a rock and a hard place, and there were betting pools going on as to when Chairman Papanoida would engineer her downfall and replace her in the Senate with his surviving daughter, Chi Eekway Papanoida.

The ingratitude was boggling, considering that Riyo and Ahsoka had saved Chi Eekway from the Confederacy’s clutches in the first place, but that was politics. It also meant that she couldn’t rule Papanoida out as a possible source of the price on Riyo’s head—not yet, anyway.

There had once been a time when she could have strolled into the Senate Office Building without anyone questioning her presence there, but those days were gone. If she tried to get in by flashing her lightsabers as she had before, she’d be subject to Temple verification and approval at best, arrested as a suspected darksider at worst. And though she did know of at least one vulnerability in the building’s security systems that she could exploit, she wanted to save it for a moment of true necessity.

So that left Riyo’s residence, or her social calendar. The Pantoran Senator lived in the Senate Apartment Complex, just like Padmé, but since unlike Padmé she hadn’t helped the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic ascend to his office and she didn’t represent the Chancellor’s home system, her residence was far more modest, and not on the top floor. Again, Ahsoka could probably get in without being noticed, but the risk of being spotted was too high. Which meant that she had to intercept Riyo while she was out and about on Coruscant.

The fact that Riyo and Papanoida were sponsoring a drama festival next week was either a real stroke of good fortune or a manifestation of the will of the Force. Ahsoka made her way to the Coruscant Opera, which Papanoida had chosen as the festival venue in a not very subtle dig at Palpatine, who preferred the Galaxies Opera House on account of the fact that his predecessor Finis Valorum had been a noted patron of the former. At the moment, she was just as glad to be sure of avoiding the purported Sith Lord.

Security at the deliveries entrance was light; there were no performances scheduled until that evening, and the only people in the building were there for rehearsals or planning for the festival next week. Ahsoka used the Force on the guard and walked in, asking the next person she came across where the planning committee meeting was being held. The Twi’lek woman directed her to the back offices on a lower floor.

A few touches of the Force got her through the locks. The carpeted corridors muffled the sounds of administration and business from the offices, and Ahsoka felt the impulse of habit telling her to rifle through them so that she could learn whatever there might be to learn. Knowledge was valuable, and secrets even more so. But there really wasn’t anything she needed here besides her friend, and so she settled down on the couch in the corridor outside the conference room in question to wait.

The meeting broke up perhaps twenty minutes later, and various staffers began heading out into the corridor. None of them gave a second glance to Ahsoka, who had wrapped herself in a thread of the Force to deflect attention.

Chairman Papanoida exited the conference room like a ship in full sail, ostentatiously giving no regard to the Senator from Pantora, who emerged from the room a pointed few minutes later, trailed by a male Pantoran aide who looked excruciatingly self-conscious on his legislator’s behalf. “Riyo,” Ahsoka said quietly, looking up from her place on the couch, and her friend turned and saw her, a smile breaking over her face.

“Ahsoka!” Riyo Chuchi exclaimed, with unfeigned pleasure. The ornaments on her headpiece swayed as she turned. She was wearing her usual maroon Senate suit; her wardrobe wasn’t as extensive as Padmé’s. “It’s good to see you! But what are you doing here?”

“It’s a long story,” Ahsoka said, standing and throwing her arms around Riyo in an impulsive hug. The Senator returned it, and over her shoulder she saw the aide’s expression of surprise. “Do you mind stepping back into that conference room for a moment?”

The aide tapped his pad. “Senator, your meeting with the Delegation of 2000—”

“Can wait,” Riyo interrupted him firmly. “Stars know that we’re not doing any more than jizz-wailing while Coruscant burns in that committee.” She nodded back towards the door she’d just walked through. “Ahsoka?”

It didn’t take long to tell her the situation, as Ahsoka didn’t really know much. She kept an eye on the aide while she talked, reaching out to the Force to try to detect any emotions that might indicate that he knew more about this than he was letting on. But she felt nothing from him but surprise, dismay, and concern, and she dropped him back down her list of suspects. It was depressingly short.

Riyo’s frown deepened as Ahsoka talked. When she had finished, the Senator let out a sigh. “I always wondered how long I would be able to stay in office,” she admitted. “I started out by pissing Chairman Papanoida off, and my record hasn’t improved from there.”

“Begin as you mean to go on?” Ahsoka suggested, feeling a smile tug at the corner of her mouth, and after a moment Riyo actually let out a laugh.

“I suppose. Did you come here just to warn me?”

“No,” Ahsoka said. “I came to keep you from getting killed.”

“The Jedi?” Riyo asked, cutting her eyes towards the ceiling.

Ahsoka shook her head. “You can make a request of the Jedi Temple, but they’re completely overwhelmed by the war. I doubt they’ll act until they have proof that the assassin, whoever they are, is really out there. Which would be them making a first attempt on your life.”

Riyo smiled thinly. “Which I might not survive.”

“That is the difficulty.” Ahsoka resisted the impulse to further explain the Order’s conduct. She wasn’t answerable for them any longer, any more than they were for her.

“Well, I’m not going to refuse your help,” Riyo told her. She hesitated, then continued. “I know you’re—an independent contractor now. My discretionary fund isn’t large, but I can certainly offer you some payment.”

“Thanks,” Ahsoka said, swallowing around a sudden lump in her throat. She probably could have refused—Obi-Wan’s retainer was generous—but she couldn’t predict what the future held.

“You’re welcome.” Riyo studied her for a moment. “I voted to acquit,” she said abruptly, apropos of nothing, and Ahsoka blinked. “At your trial. I wish—” She broke off, and Ahsoka shook her head.

“Don’t worry about it.” She found that it wasn’t difficult to say the words; she believed them. “It wasn’t your fault, and I know you took a risk to vote against Palpatine’s wishes. I think—he’s not a supporter of the Jedi. Or of me.”

“I’ve had that thought too,” Riyo said quietly. There was silence in the room for a few seconds; Ahsoka felt the aide’s unobtrusive presence acutely, even though she didn’t look at him. If it had just been the two of them, she might have unspooled more of her suspicions, and Obi-Wan’s warnings. But with the adjutant here, that was impossible. Riyo seemed to follow her thoughts; at length, she inhaled and straightened. “What do you need me to do?”

“I don’t trust the Blues,” Ahsoka said bluntly, “and I don’t think you should either. For now, I need you to give me staff credentials. And with your permission, I can see about getting you some guards in plainclothes for the festival’s opening event.”

Riyo drummed her fingers on the table. “You think that’s when they’ll strike?”

“It’s what I’d do,” Ahsoka said, which was the truth.

The next part of the plan, such as it was, was harder. While she and the Senator from Alderaan were friends—it was hard not to be, when they’d survived the same First Battle of Christophsis and attempted to ride herd on Padmé together many times—the last time they’d seen one another had been at her trial, and she didn’t have an obvious way to contact him. And while Bail’s official residence on Coruscant was probably one of the few places on the planet that Palpatine didn’t have ears in, she didn’t have any way to get in there without being observed either. So to get Alderaanian Royal Guards—or possibly Naboo Royal Guards—in plainclothes for Riyo, she had to reach out to a different old friend, and Ahsoka didn’t have so many of those that she wasn’t a little nervous about it. Particularly since this old friend most definitely had her own problems.

But Padmé Amidala didn’t look unhappy to see her when Ahsoka keyed in her private com code from the terminal in the back of Dex’s kitchen. “Ahsoka,” she said warmly, her face and voice reflecting the same unalloyed pleasure that Ahsoka felt from her in the Force, and the overwhelming feeling of relief nearly had her swaying on her feet. Padmé didn’t care that she’d left the Jedi Order, and the weight of that was something Ahsoka didn’t realize she’d been carrying until she’d shed it. “It’s good to see you alive. How are you? Is anything wrong?”

Ahsoka swallowed. “I—it’s good to see you too,” she said, and she felt a twinge in the Force as she spoke, some kind of warning or possible future that she couldn’t interpret. “I’m all right. There is—I am calling to ask you for a favor, but things aren’t any more wrong than normal. Or any less,” she added.

Padmé’s expression turned rueful. “I think I understand what you mean. I’m supposed to depart for the Senate shortly—it will be difficult for me to get away for us to meet in person the next few days, though you can drop by my apartment if you prefer.”

“Surveillance,” Ahsoka told her, and Padmé winced. “I’d prefer not to. If you don’t mind my not telling you everything for now, I only need two things: for you to attend the opening event of Senator Chuchi and Chairman Papanoida’s drama festival next week, and for you to recommend me to Senator Organa.”

Something tugged at the corner of Padmé’s mouth; from her emotions, it wasn’t quite a smile. “I don’t mind you not telling me everything, for now,” she said, just the faintest stress on the last words. “What I don’t know, I don’t have to lie about not knowing. And I was already planning on attending Riyo’s event. As for Bail—may I ask what you want me to recommend you for?”

“I need help from security forces I can trust for a certain person,” Ahsoka said flatly. “The Jedi won’t do it without better evidence than I have, which leaves his private guards or yours.”

Padmé nodded slowly. “Who is the person in question?”

“Riyo Chuchi,” Ahsoka said. She didn’t comment on Padmé’s spike of concern. “Word is there’s a price on her head, and I don’t know enough to track whoever’s taken the job. It will be much easier to flush out the assassin at the drama festival, but I need a few other people to lay an effective trap.”

Padmé frowned, her expression going a little distant; Ahsoka could sense her thoughts turning to more abstract considerations. “Very well,” she said after another few moments, her gaze sharpening on Ahsoka again. “I’ll give you some of my guards—if I’m going to be at the drama festival already, we can put it about that they were just there to protect me, rather than having to try to explain why some of Bail’s people were mixed up in it. And it’s known that you and I are friends.”

“That’s a good point,” Ahsoka said, stifling a flare of annoyance at herself for not having thought of that already. While it was true that she’d gotten out of the habit of operating at this level of planning and vigilance, she couldn’t lose her edge now; she wouldn’t survive long if she did. “Thank you.”

“I’ll transmit Captain Typho’s private com code,” Padmé told her. “You can coordinate with him directly.”

“Thank you, Padmé,” Ahsoka said, taking a breath. “I am in your debt.”

A year ago, the Naboo Senator might have waved off her expressions of gratitude, but now she nodded slowly. “I’m happy to help,” she said, “both you and Riyo. Since the war is still ongoing, the new Queen has temporarily increased my complement of guards and handmaidens above the statutory limit. I might as well use them.”

Ahsoka wasn’t precisely surprised; she’d seen for herself the deep respect with which everyone on Naboo regarded Padmé. At twelve years old the new Queen, Apailana, was young even by Naboo standards, but Padmé had supported her bid for the throne after Queen Neeyutnee had announced her early retirement. Ahsoka didn’t blame Neeyutnee for wanting the peace that so far eluded the galaxy; she’d taken office within weeks of the start of the war, and doubtless had never expected to have to deal with its ravages when she’d run to replace the previous queen.

Neeyutnee’s retirement and Apailana’s youth put Padmé in something of a bind, however: if push came to shove, Apailana would almost certainly side with Chancellor Palpatine rather than Senator Amidala. Ahsoka wasn’t sure that Palpatine cared much about his homeworld anymore, but it was certainly true that Padmé was far more personally beloved there than he was. If he ever deigned to see her stature onplanet as a threat, things could get very bad for her very quickly, and getting her guards mixed up in preventing Sith assassination attempts on another Senator made it more likely that he would.

All of which Padmé knew, but she had made the offer anyway. Which was why, when it came right down to it, there wasn’t a lot that Ahsoka wouldn’t do for her, if and when she ever asked. “I appreciate it,” Ahsoka told her. “I know that there are people who would prefer you stayed out of it.” She didn’t just mean Anakin, whose overprotective attitude towards his secret paramour she had witnessed for herself. But she was thinking of him, and hoping that Padmé wouldn’t tell him about this. “If you ever need my help, just tell me where and when. That’s a promise.”

Padmé appeared to take her words equally seriously. “When I do, I know where to find you,” she said. “Now, I have a committee meeting to attend, and I imagine you have your own business.”

“I do,” Ahsoka said. “I’ll be in touch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back! Nothing like strong feelings from Chapter 13 of The Mandalorian to give me the shot of energy I needed to get over the revision hump on this chapter. I'm still writing, and while I can't promise regular updates, I do intend to finish the fic as soon as I can.


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